Team:Calgary/Fundraising/Blog

Every Thursday (started at the end of June), our marketing team uses our Synthetic BLOGology blog to update both the public and the rest of the team of their progress in fundraising for both this year and future years. For more details regarding Synthetic BLOGology, please click HERE.

-July
-August

These updates have been posted with newest ones at the top.

Hello everyone,

My name is Fahd Mirza and you are reading my FM 707.1 marketing update for the week of August 17th. This week was rather slow for marketing because our marketing team was either busy with lab or ethics work. However we still managed to get a lot of stuff done for marketing,

1) Last Thursday, we were interviewed by the CJSW 90.9 Radio station. CJSW is the University of Calgary Community Radio station whose aim is to promote the activities of the University of Calgary students in Calgary and surrounding areas. We were interviewed by Joe Burima, who is the current program director for CJSW. On behalf of the University of Calgary iGEM team, we would like to sincerely thank CJSW for their support to iGEM and hope that they would continue to support our team in the future.
2) This week, Prima and I continued to contact Syn-Bio and Oil & Gas Companies for potential sponsorship/partnership. We hope to wrap up the sponsorship agenda by the end of August.
3) The biggest news of this week is that we have surpassed the amount of funds that we needed for this year. All the funds generated from now on will be contributed towards our next year’s iGEM fund for recruitment and other purposes.
4) We have also been working on our August newsletter which will be out soon.

WHAT’S NEXT?
We have also been working on our August newsletter which will be out soon. Also Prima has contacted the company that will be responsible for making our University of Calgary 2009 iGEM team shirts. We will also be working on attracting the media’s attention for our aGEM and iGEM jamborees.

Hi everyone,
My name is Fahd Mirza and you are reading the FM 707.1 Marketing Update for the week of August 3rd 2009 and August 10th 2009. These past two weeks have been intensely busy and highly productive for our marketing team. Last week, we had organized a massive bake sale having more than 400 baked items to sell. This event managed to raise a net profit of $500.04 Cdn Dollars. All the funds would be directed towards our research project. We had also managed to get sponsorships from Corning Life Sciences (Thanks to Prima Moinul) and VWR Scientific (Courtesy Fahd Mirza) last week. Our July newsletter was also ready to be sent out to potential/current/future sponsors and to media organizations who gave us media coverage. I want to thank Jamie Feng and Prima Moinul for doing a marvelous job on the newsletter.

Nexen Inc. was declared our Sponsor of the Month for the month of August. It is with Nexen Inc.’s generous donation that iGEM Calgary would be able to achieve its goals.

This week, our iGEM Calgary team toured the Oil Sands in Fort McMurray courtesy of Andrew Hessel and OSLI (Oil Sands Leadership Initiative). The tour was a great learning experience and an exciting opportunity for iGEM Calgary team to work on future potential synthetic biology projects for iGEM. It was also an opportunity for our marketing team to form important partnerships with the Oil and Gas Development companies. We are still working on getting more sponsorship for our research project and I hope that we are successful in this endeavor. Within the next couple of weeks our marketing team will be working on our August newsletter and getting media coverage for our project, the All Alberta iGEM Jamboree (also called aGEM) and the iGEM competition itself at MIT.

Hey guys,

I’m Prima and I’m back on the show again!! This has been a very successful week for iGEM Calgary. I’d like to specially thank VWR and Corning Life Sciences for sponsoring our project. Both of these generous contributors have been recognized under the Bronze category of our sponsors.

The marketing team also finished, edited and began to distribute the July newsletter to all companies. This newsletter highlights the achievements and progress of iGEM Calgary for the month of July. Aside from that, Jamie, Fahd, Jeremy and I are slaving away with our hard core marketing responsibilities! We followed up with numerous companies who are considering our sponsorship package, set up meetings and thanked all other companies for considering our project.

We have an exciting week coming up as the team prepares for its next ultimate fundraising project: iGEM Bake sale trinity! This time we’ll come prepared with double the treats, triple the advertisements and of course 15 talented iGEMers to make Wednesday August 5th a once in a life time event!! Come devour the ambrosia!!! We have high expectations for next week and if all else goes well, iGEM Calgary will celebrate with a end of the year team get together. That’s about it! Peace out!

Some of the culinary delights offered at our bakesale

Hi, this is Fahd (AKA FM 707), and I just finished my first year in Health and Society. I love cooking, soccer, and being on the marketing team!

This week, our marketing team had organized a bake sale as part of our fundraising campaign for the University of Calgary 2009 iGEM team. The bake sale took place at the Health Sciences Centre, University of Calgary on Tuesday, 30th June 2009. All iGEM team members had participated at this event. Baked goods included samosas, spring rolls, cupcakes, muffins, cinnamon buns and cheese cakes. We made a net profit of $370.00 Cdn dollars which will be used for sequencing reactions. We also had a $1000 Cdn dollars contribution from BioAlberta whose logo we have posted on our WIKI. We have been, so far this week, turned down by VWR and LI-COR Biosciences.