One Week Down 51 To Go!

The bread + butter project is celebrating its one-week anniversary. 480 site visits, more than a 1,000 page views, 7 completed orders, our first nonprofit partnership established, countless encouraging emails from old and new friends and followers, and a few heated debates among the 4 core members of the bread + butter project team. These are just a few highlights.

Katie, Sue, Emma and I had our second ‘business meeting’ last night over dinner. I can’t even tell you how tempted I was to produce an agenda, but I restrained myself. We reviewed our results, talked about what we had accomplished, and discussed what we need to do next.

This week, Katie and Emma did some research to better understand hunger needs across the US, as well as state population figures. This is some of the data we’ll use to figure out our expansion plan. Last week, we had talked about wanting to try to make a difference in 50 states within the first year, but when we looked at the calendar and what that would take, we decided that it would be better to make a bigger difference in a smaller number of states to start, beginning locally with Pettengill House, Inc., expanding throughout New England, and then figuring out where to go from there. I’d really like to have partnerships established in every New England state in time for this year’s holiday shopping season, and I think we can do it.

What we learned during week 1:
Katie – 22 US states have more than 11% of their population living in hunger.
Sue – The bread + butter sweatpants are really comfortable.
Emma – Texas needs a lot of help.
Tom – It can be fun to start something even if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

What we need to focus in week 2:
Get more people to follow us on the blog – might need to explain to people how to become a ‘follower’ or develop an email list that people can opt into. Register our business – we think this can be done at Newburyport City Hall – Sue and Emma agreed to look into this. Make a bread + butter PDF that we can post on the blog so that people can download it and include it with bread + butter products that they give as gifts – Katie said she would take the lead on this. Make a video with Katie and Emma singing their bread + butter theme song that we can post on the blog – this will be fun for all of us. Emma also had some great ideas about making signs/posters and sending sample products to celebrities who have an interest in hunger. Sue mentioned Ashley Tisdale, who I later learned is the one from High School Musical who had a nose job. Apparently she supports hunger-related causes. Who knew?

Thanks to our bread + butter supporters:
We got a lot of great help this week from many friends and followers, including: Robin, who bought the first two bread + butter shirts and offered to send us a picture of her boys wearing them to post on the blog; Jen, who sent us several ideas about upcoming events where we could promote our project; Annie, who is running for Congress in NH and made our first ‘out-of-state’ purchase and sent Katie and Emma a really great note of encouragement and offered to have them sell shirts and promote bread + butter at any of her campaign events; Glenn, who offered to connect us with his contacts in many states and to provide whatever help he could, even offering up his teen-age boys as volunteers; And finally, Jeff, who spent hours on the phone and on the web helping us set-up and adjust many things on the blog. Thank you all!

What can the rest of you do to help?
Buy some products, wear them and tell everyone where you got them.
Email our blog to your friends and family members.
Send us an idea about what we can do to make our blog more interactive.

-Tom

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