2008-08-16

Well with the Olympics last night and the night before emailing 768 Past Relayers, I needed a rest yesterday.  I did meet with our Relay Mgr - I call her Coach.  Since this is my second relay and first time being a chair, I have lots of questions.  But Coach is patient and full of knowledge. 

Just to change the subject a little, in my emailing the past relayers, I now have a new friend, his name is Bob.  You know you think you do things for you (I started relay in memory of my brother "Boo") I wanted to pay it forward for the help ACS gave us, but I see everyday, this is not just for me to keep my brothers memory alive, its to share, to help and be there when someone needs you.  Bob is a suvivor of cancer of the larynx - its been 9 years, and here he his electro larynx - taking the time to talk to students about smoking.  Wow not only is Bob my new friend, He is my hero! My hat (should I say wig) - that's another story for another day....goes off to Bob.

Let me tell you about how quickly I emailed 700 plus -I want you back letters.  As I stated I created an Access data base.  It holds all the information of Team Captains, Survivors and Participants.  In Access I created a query  (a method on what information you want to view only) for Captains, Participants, Survivors.  I ran the query and named each one.  Then I created what I call a We want you back letter in word and selected mail merge.  By accident the other day, I found you can Mail Merge into an email.  So I went through the steps and it began formating the letter with the Name, Team name etc and began to send each one an email with thier customize letter being the body of the email.  I could not believe it.  The only draw back was I got alot of bounce backs, which was not so bad, because it allowed me to delete those bad addresses.  Out of 768 I beleive sent - I recieved 168 back.  But I made contact with 600 in the matter of 15 minutes.  Amazing  Then I ran a query of all who did not have an email and was able to email the letter (not so personal) to our ACS staff with the labels already created for them to print and mail - so there was the other 600 or so contacted.  So of the 1200 something in the data base.  By the middle of next week all of them would have heard from us.  Now we wait.  I will keep you posted on the response.

Hey have a great Sunday - for all the worshipers - Praise the Lord!