2014 is here which means Phase 2 is a go! Sadly unlike Marvels Phase 2 we don’t have an endless budget and the creative genius of Stan Lee and Joss Whedon, although we do have plans to reach out to their representatives. One thing we have that Marvel has is superheroes and we have them in abundance. 19 supplied us with recipes and 328 bought our book.
So what is Phase 2 you ask, well Phase 2 is us reaching out into the geek community to raise awareness of our project to help us continue to support Child’s Play Charity. We want to take things we did last year and improve on them, to make them bigger, better and more fun for everyone.
New website
As you may have noticed we’ve redeveloped the site and integrated Joomla into it which will makes things much easier for us to update and to bring more cool stuff your way.
EDIT: Joomla didn’t work out for us, the site loading was unbelievably slow and we were limited with the things we wanted to do so we have a WordPress site now.
Competitions and Auctions
So far we’ve run one competition and two auctions. The competition was to create a Star Wars themed recipe and was won by Carol McCurdie who submitted a recipe for R2-D2 cupcakes and received a $50 ThinkGeek voucher and also had her recipe included in our book.
The two auctions so far have been for a signed copy of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and a signed copy of Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing which was signed by Alexis Denisof and Tom Lenk. These 2 auctions raised a total of $110.
We aim to continue to bring you more competitions and auctions through the year so keep an eye out on our site and social media for details.
Conventions
We’ve been discussing attending cons for a while now, last year we got offered a spot at LFCC but turned it down due to us wanting to have a really great showing and we didn’t feel that if we attended we’d be able to get everything ready, especially when LFCC was around the same time we were finalising the book for release.
This year cons are certainly on the agenda and we hope to see you at whichever cons we attend whether we’re there with a booth and attending as fans. Do keep an eye on our Conventions page and on social media for where we’ll be attending.
Donation Drives
I think for us this year Donation Drives will be something we will really focus on as it has huge potential to reach a lot of people. We have a page dedicated here which will be kept up-to-date with all the goings on but the long and short of it is we want to partner with a variety of gaming, toy, comic and book shops where we can place a donation box for you to donate any unwanted games, comic and books which we’ll then deliver to the various children’s hospitals, orphanages and hospices who want to take part.
For now we’re going to be trialing it in the UK before we start reaching out to the rest of the world <mwhahaha world domination> but if you’re not in the UK and know of any shops that would like to take part please let us know.
When we attend cons we’ll also have a donation box with us so you can bring along anything you wish to donate.
New Books
We’d love to put out a new book or even two books this year and that was the original plan but we already have a lot going on and if we can use 2014 as the year to really push and announce ourselves then in 2015 we’ll have a good solid base to work from which will hopefully mean a lot more recipes and a lot more books sold meaning more money for Child’s Play.
Thanks for reading and thanks for supporting us and don’t forget to check back soon for more news.
Lee