Avid earned another shot to win $50K!

Hi, you wonderful people.

Thanks to you guys, Avid has another chance to win a $50,000 grant. We made it among the top 100 runners-up for April in Pepsi's Refresh Everything! competition, which means we've earned a place in the May competition! Now if we want to win, we'll have to push push push to get in the top ten and stay there. Please be as obnoxious with this as is comfortable for you. :) Send the Pepsi link to friends and family. Know someone famous who likes to read? Ask them to tweet about it, share it on their website, or create a Facebook post encouraging fans to vote. My tip is to sign in first, THEN vote. When the "vote" button disappears, you know your vote has been counted. (At the end of April I found out that lots of people *thought* they were voting, but it turned out that for most of the month their votes weren't being counted due to the site's confusing nature.)
www.refresheverything.com/AvidforAthens

Take care, and thank you!

-Janet G.

(Donate in any amount here: http://indiegogo.com/AvidBookshop)

the grant that almost was...

For quite awhile now, I've been gearing up to submit a grant application to Pepsi's Refresh Everything program.  To make a long story short, Pepsi is giving away lots of monthly grants in various amounts (smallest grant is $5,000; biggest one is $250,000).  I was pretty proud of the application I put together, complete with my second-ever iMovie.

12:01 AM EST today, March 1st, the voting opened.  And I could not log in correctly.  I kept getting a welcome screen for a 50-year-old named Stacey.  (I'm not Stacey, and I'm not 50.  I'm Janet, and I'm 30.) When they finally did recognize me as Janet Geddis of Avid Bookshop, they had no application on file for me.  Frustrating to say the least!

As of 12:22 AM, 1000 ideas had been submitted and the submission process was closed.  Alas. Sorry, Avid wallet.

It's not much of a consolation to know that hundreds of others had similar difficulties.  I applaud Pepsi's willingness to donate grant money to causes that will effect positive change in the world, but I do wish they'd anticipated the turnout a bit more and been able to handle the traffic.

Because you are an Avid blog reader, you get to watch the video that was part of my seemingly lost application!  Lucky, lucky you. 

I can't embed the video because it's wide-screen, so click here to view it.