Thursday, December 23, 2010

Festival: A Year in Review

2010 has been a big year at Festival Promotions! The founder Jay Flesher sold the company to Lee Boyd and Scott McLaren in early 2010 but has remained on as an integral part of the team. It may seem like a bit of an unusual situation, but then again Festival is an unusual company itself, so it all works out!

The year was marked with some awesome projects with clients and some really neat philanthropic endeavors. Check them out below.

Nuts About Cancer:
In almost fated way, Brian from Nuts About Cancer got in touch with Scott at Festival Promotions. Arlene Dickinson of Dragon's Den fame had made a call to her twitter followers to tweet out a Random Act of Kindness. Being in the promo products business, Scott thought what better way to help than to donate some Tshirts for a smaller charity that probably doesn't have the budget to do their own promo items. Brian got in touch with us after Arlene Re-Tweeted my offer and the Nuts About Cancer Shirts were born! Brian is now working on the 'Everyman Grand-Slam' and where he will complete the big 5 Marathons, the last three of which occur in a span of about 6 weeks!! 3

The Hanne Howard Foundation:
Again, in a way that only Festival can, we found ourselves working with a seemingly random assortment of organizations to help fund education in Africa. Merkburn Holdings had come across 125,000 pencils, without an idea of how best to use them. The pencils were mentioned to two people, Ted Horton of Sports Experts and the Hanne Howard Foundation. Ted had the idea to have a doantion box at the Sports Experts store locations where people could 'take a pencil, leave a donation' With that in mind, Festival got to work and developed a clear acrylic donation box, with a cardboard pencil holder. The end product grabs the attention of shoppers, and makes sure that it doesn't take up too much counter space at the cash. But the work wasn't done there, we still had distribution concerns! And that's where the Scouts Canada came in. The scouts helped us prep the pencils and pack them for delivery to each of the Sports Experts locations. And to top it all off we had a pizza part with Hanne of the foundation herself! For more information please check out the foundation at www.hannehowardfund.org.

Movember
No one got more excited about Movember than Festival Partner, Scott McLaren. Weeks before the 1st of November, Scott had formed a team and the donations had begun. In an effort to raise money, Festival donated 50 tshirts to be sold with 100% of the proceeds going to Movember The tshirts can be seen here: We also had a lot of fun working with our clients on some fun Movember fundraising initiatives. The favourite had to be these awesome Mo-Flasks done for the Communications Students Association at the University of Ottawa. Scott also produced a heart-wrenching farewell to his Mo as the month closed: Goodbye my Mo - When all the dust settled the Festival Movember Team had raised just over $1,600!

From Houses to Homes
And of course our flagship project, The Guatemala House in conjunction with From Houses to Homes. This year Jay and Scott decided to formalize our international development projects and give one of our college and university clients a house built in their name in the mayan projects outside Antigua Guatemala. We also are covering the flights for two representatives from that school to go down and actually do the build! To see who won go here: You can also follow the progress of the home build and additional fundraising efforts on the Festival Facebook Page:

2010 has been a great year and we have a lot planned for 2011 as well so stay connected with us, and watch what 'the original social medium' can do!

www.festival.net

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