I just wanted to quickly update everybody on where we were with last year's Heartwalk/Daniel Vang read drive and hopefully solicit some good ideas on how to approach 2014's drive.
As many of you have realized, it has indeed taken Dan awhile to get to most of the reads....months. I think it's getting harder for him to get to everything as quickly as he would like as his own managerial career grows and his profile at Benderspink raises.
He just sent me a batch of responses from the 2013 drive and expressed interest in one donor's television pilot -- so that's a very cool thing for that writer. We'll see where it goes.
If you submitted for 2013 please continue to be patient. That's all I can say. I said upfront that the only thing guaranteed was that Daniel will read what he's supposed to read -- I had no way to tell when he'd be able to get to those reads and still don't -- I was clear about that.
Going forward for 2014, I'm on the fence honestly as to whether we could discontinue the drive or not. At a minimum I know a change in approach is called for and wanted to run a few ideas by you guys and also open the forum for any of your ideas.
1. We could just discontinue it. It's a ton of work for both me and Dan and over the years we've raised almost $100,000 (or over?) to fight heart disease and stroke. Several writers who donated have also gained representation from the endeavor, too, so there'd certainly be no shame in walking away now.
2. We could up the ante and raise the minimum donation up from $25, possibly doing something like a $100 minimum donation to the American Heart Association gets you considered for representation by Dan. A higher donation limit would hopefully keep the number of scripts Dan would have to read at a manageable level while still bringing in funds for the American Heart Association's great cause (remember 100% of all donations ever have gone straight to the AHA and will continue to do so should we continue). There would still be no way to guarantee how long it would take to hear back and there's absolutely no way notes or anything like that could be provided. Dan's a working manager for one of the biggest management/production companies in hollywood and just wouldn't have the time to provide notes regardless of the size of the donation. Just want to be clear about that. It's not an option. We tried one line of notes several years back and it was a disaster on multiple fronts -- was just too much on Dan.
I haven't even approached Dan about 2014 yet to see if he'd still be willing to do continue doing this under any format -- he may not -- it's been a lot on him and honestly we've both had to deal with some pretty strange situations over the past several years in doing this.
I wanted to get everybody's thoughts, though, before I approached him as I guess I'm looking for some brilliant solution that would avoid us having to pull the plug on this at it does a lot of good for a lot of people.
Thoughts?
As many of you have realized, it has indeed taken Dan awhile to get to most of the reads....months. I think it's getting harder for him to get to everything as quickly as he would like as his own managerial career grows and his profile at Benderspink raises.
He just sent me a batch of responses from the 2013 drive and expressed interest in one donor's television pilot -- so that's a very cool thing for that writer. We'll see where it goes.
If you submitted for 2013 please continue to be patient. That's all I can say. I said upfront that the only thing guaranteed was that Daniel will read what he's supposed to read -- I had no way to tell when he'd be able to get to those reads and still don't -- I was clear about that.
Going forward for 2014, I'm on the fence honestly as to whether we could discontinue the drive or not. At a minimum I know a change in approach is called for and wanted to run a few ideas by you guys and also open the forum for any of your ideas.
1. We could just discontinue it. It's a ton of work for both me and Dan and over the years we've raised almost $100,000 (or over?) to fight heart disease and stroke. Several writers who donated have also gained representation from the endeavor, too, so there'd certainly be no shame in walking away now.
2. We could up the ante and raise the minimum donation up from $25, possibly doing something like a $100 minimum donation to the American Heart Association gets you considered for representation by Dan. A higher donation limit would hopefully keep the number of scripts Dan would have to read at a manageable level while still bringing in funds for the American Heart Association's great cause (remember 100% of all donations ever have gone straight to the AHA and will continue to do so should we continue). There would still be no way to guarantee how long it would take to hear back and there's absolutely no way notes or anything like that could be provided. Dan's a working manager for one of the biggest management/production companies in hollywood and just wouldn't have the time to provide notes regardless of the size of the donation. Just want to be clear about that. It's not an option. We tried one line of notes several years back and it was a disaster on multiple fronts -- was just too much on Dan.
I haven't even approached Dan about 2014 yet to see if he'd still be willing to do continue doing this under any format -- he may not -- it's been a lot on him and honestly we've both had to deal with some pretty strange situations over the past several years in doing this.
I wanted to get everybody's thoughts, though, before I approached him as I guess I'm looking for some brilliant solution that would avoid us having to pull the plug on this at it does a lot of good for a lot of people.
Thoughts?
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