Editing The Pen Addict 584/transcript (section)

== Pen Addict Raffle for St. Jude ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Talking about good things. Do you want to give the final total raised for the pen addict? What do we call it?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I mean, I call it the pen addict raffle for St. Jude. I call it the pen addict raffle for St. Jude.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I have heard word. Raffle is not a great word, but I don't know another word to use. So we're just going to keep calling it that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So we're going to have this discussion right here. I think if I say like giveaway or fundraiser, I think I have different requirements. Like there's like this legal gray area where like I can get my butt in a sling for certain things, even though I don't think I ever would. But that's why I never call this. We could just come up with a new name, you know? We could. We could. Some event-based name. But I never ever. Yeah. I never ever call this a giveaway because that is something. There is some. I remember when I first started doing this, I was very concerned about like doing it right. And I'm not saying that I do currently do it right, but I do feel that like having like the word giveaway not part of this is key. So, yeah, I don't love that word anyway. But what we do for all of you listeners and podcast readers, we try to raise money for St. Jude's through the pen addict. And what we have is a bunch of retailers, a bunch of listeners, a bunch of readers, a bunch of friends donating products to this one large prize pool. And what we do, that's also another word I should say. So, I'm officially getting sued now. FTC, just leave us alone. All right? You know what I'm saying? We're just trying to raise money for the kids here. Why can't we have nice things, Myke? I just want to raise money for the kids. You know what I mean? I just want to raise money for the kids. So, and everyone who donates and sends me their receipts through the month of September through the pen addict, they know what they're signing up for, right? They know exactly what's going on. This isn't some big, like we're not giving away a car here and making sure all the legalese is correct. We're trying to raise a bunch of money for the kids. And we have a lot of great participants in this. How much money did you raise, Brad? How much money did you raise? This year, I tallied up $49,180.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Huge.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Big money. Big money. Thank you. Definitely the largest amount we've raised. I didn't go back and audit the last five years. I know this is the biggest. I think one year we did it, we cracked 40. Then we're usually more like around 30, which is awesome on its own. Like if we raise anything, it's great, right? But this year was spectacular. In particular, everyone who supported by donating prizes and then donating money to help the kids at St. Jude's. Like it was a big deal. It was a big deal for us. It was great to see the support we had for this. And just to catch up, if people haven't seen the blog post, I have emailed everyone who won a raffle prize for the giveaway. So if you didn't get an email yet, there is not one forthcoming, unfortunately. I'm sorry. But I did contact all the winners. I think they probably all contacted me back by this point. So we're in good shape for that. And it was a blast. It's always a big deal to do this every month. And let's just say and segue into your part, what you do and what Stephen does and what RelayFM does as a whole. Can you give me the current status? Yes. And then let's talk about your trip and the big podcast-a-thon.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, so it was not a surprise to me that we've raised more money here through the pen addict because it seems like we've raised more money everywhere this year. Our previous total, every year we have raised more money than the previous year. Now, sometimes just by a hair. So last year we raised $706,000. The year before I think was $703,000 or something like that. Like it was really close.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I was like, did they typo the numbers? Because it sounds like the same number.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So close. And so, you know, going into it this year, we were not feeling particularly confident that we would actually even surpass last year's total. Because, you know, you never really know. And also the economy is weird right now. But we have, I would say, obliterated last year's total. We've raised $756,000 for the kids of St. Jude just this year alone. We are at $2.96 million total over the last five years. If somebody has $37,000 just lying around, if you want to drop that to stjude.org slash relay by Friday evening, it would be preferable.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, two days left, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. But yeah, that's amazing. It's incredible. Thank you so much to everybody that's donated. No matter how you donated or how much you donated, all of this money, all of this money goes to the kids of St. Jude. It's all going towards ending childhood cancer. We are still fundraising for the next couple of days. So if you haven't yet or if you're feeling particularly generous and you want to give again, please go to stjude.org slash relay and you could do so. Brad mentioned my travels. So we were doing the podcast-a-thon for St. Jude, which we did a couple of weeks ago now. It was a 12-hour event live from the campus over at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. It was me and Stephen and we were joined by RelayFM host Kathy Campbell and Jason Snell this time. And we put on, I would say, a really, really, really fun event. Like if you've not seen it, it's on YouTube now. It's in two parts, like two six-hour videos. You can go ahead and watch those and see all the happenings. I would say the entire time there was always something fun going on. And I'm really proud of the work that everybody did into making this a reality. We had action replays this year. Like it was like a whole next level of production. And I'm super proud of it. And I think we did a super good job. And I think that that has been borne out in the money that we've raised this year as a community. So very, very thankful.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Super proud of you and Stephen and everyone behind the scenes, everyone at St. Jude who, you know, helps put this production on. It's a big deal.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, they do such a great job for us. And they're so helpful. And they help us realize all these really honestly stupid things that we want to do a lot of the time. So like we're very, very thankful of it. But it's all going towards one singular cause, which is raising money to defeat childhood cancer. And who can argue with that, you know?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Exactly, exactly. And do you remember way back around $296,000 raised or so? Yeah. Remember thinking that that was like, that was a number we're probably going to hit, but it might be a while. Well, I owed you a little bit of something around then, didn't I?