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Vote from Any Country for ME/FM Charity to Win $20,000!

View the Post on the Blog

by Sasha


Image by www.facebook.com/MEAwarenessPics


The first thing to say about this: you don’t need Facebook!

The second thing: you don’t have to be in Canada to vote!

The third thing... well, time to give you the details...

Nature’s Bounty, a long-established manufacturer of vitamins and food supplements, is running an online voting contest for Canadian charities. The National ME/FM Action Network has entered.

The Action Network is probably best-known internationally for spearheading the development of the Canadian Consensus Criteria.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of rigorous diagnostic criteria in this disease: we all owe the Action Network a debt for this contribution to diagnosis and research. The Network also hosted the 2011 IACFS/ME Conference in Ottawa. But as well as these international achievements, for the past twenty years the Action Network has supported patients through advocacy, education, information, and promoting research. It’s the main charity for the 750,000 people in Canada with ME or FM.

So it’s well worth supporting the Action Network in the contest. The top three winners will get $20,000, $10,000 and $5,000 respectively. Of the remaining charities, three will be chosen at random to each win $5,000. US dollars and Canadian dollars are worth the same: $20,000 is about £13,000 or 15,000 Euros. That would be a considerable boost to any national ME/FM charity.

Voting opens on Tuesday, 26 February, and continues with one vote allowed per day until Friday, 29 March.

At the time of writing, voting instructions have not appeared but if you go to the Nature's Bounty contest webpage, all should become clear on the day.

There’s a big push behind the Action Network for this contest: a team of supporters has already been posting widely on the net to drum up support. Let’s help them win.

Got any questions? We’ve got a thread for that! The competition looks straightforward but the first post in this thread will be updated with instructions and help if any problems emerge.

Have you heard about other contests? Many, many small prize contests are announced in local papers, on the radio, and so on. If you notice any, please message helen41 so that she and the fundraising team can look into them. Every dollar helps!
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View the Post on the Blog
 
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snowathlete
Sasha said:
Hi golden - just under the tickboxes for T&Cs and getting mailings, can you see a 'vote' button just under there? It's a little hard to see - it's pale purple on a dark purple ground with 'vote' in white letters.

Edit: a cleverer person than me could provide a screenshot... :whistle:
Click to expand...

Here's a screenshot. See the vote button in the bottom right?
If you dont, then your screen resolution might be low, in which case you will get a little grey scroll bar on the right hand side of the purple window (below the white cross), you can use that to scroll down to see the vote button.
votebutton.jpg
 

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  • votebutton.jpg
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snowathlete
We have breached 100 votes. That's really great, it puts us in third, but first isn't that far ahead. We can definately catch them, but we need to push on!

Make sure you send a link to the voting page or this article, to your friends and family. Get your mum, dad, sister, brother, nephew, neice, aunt, uncle, son, daughter, neighbour, dog, cat and ginea pig to vote! OK, the last three are probably against the rules, besides which they may have conflicting interests, but seriously - pass this on to other people. It really does make a difference!
 
S
snowathlete said:
We have breached 100 votes. That's really great, it puts us in third, but first isn't that far ahead. We can definately catch them, but we need to push on!

Make sure you send a link to the voting page or this article, to your friends and family. Get your mum, dad, sister, brother, nephew, neice, aunt, uncle, son, daughter, neighbour, dog, cat and ginea pig to vote! OK, the last three are probably against the rules, besides which they may have conflicting interests, but seriously - pass this on to other people. It really does make a difference!
Click to expand...

I agree - votes are flailing around as the morning hits the different time zones in Canada and as people start hitting up their online contacts, us included. It's going to be all over the place so we must just push, push, push!

Yeah, those cats and stuff have got vested interests in some of those other charities... :cat:
 
S
Thanks much to Sasha for the article and to the ME/CFS Fundraising group for getting a charity entered.

I was149 and then it allowed me to put in my husband's email address, he was 155.

I did not read the T & C's, I hope that they both will count. If anyone knows how many emails can come from one IP address, we may be able to get our family's permission and just put in their email addresses every day??

By the way - we are still in second place in the middle of the day - yahoo :thumbsup:
 
snowathlete
SpecialK82 said:
Thanks much to Sasha for the article and to the ME/CFS Fundraising group for getting a charity entered.

I was149 and then it allowed me to put in my husband's email address, he was 155.

I did not read the T & C's, I hope that they both will count. If anyone knows how many emails can come from one IP address, we may be able to get our family's permission and just put in their email addresses every day??
Click to expand...

I agree, this is well worth checking!

We are in second at the moment, but several others are close behind!

On the main page of the article - View the Post on the Blog - You can share the page via facebook, twitter, google+, by using the controls on the left:
sharebutton.jpg

Just click on the green button and then click Facebook, Twitter, or whatever method of sharing you want to use. Makes a massive difference spreading the word. Also if you have popular friends or contacts, ask them to re-tweet your tweet. Same with facebook posts.

I just noticed that there are share buttons at the bottom of the forum thread too!
 
snowathlete
You can do it by selecting all the text in your sig with your mouse or by holding down shift and using the cursor keys, and then click the allign centre button:
sig.jpg


Note: you dont see the control buttons if you try to edit on your mobile, ipod (i didnt anyway), so you'll need to do it on your computer/laptop/pad.

If your on your phone, or it isnt working on your computer then try adding tags on either side of the text like this.
Code: 
[CENTER]text you want to display[/CENTER]
 
S
Thanks Sasha and Snowathlete (Love the screen shots!) I did try using the align center originally after I just cut and pasted Sasha's sig into my signature box. It all slid to the left in preview. Then I highlight each line individually and hit align center, it still slid left in the preview.

So just now I went back into it and it all started out of the left side, and I then re-applied the align center to each line and it's working now. So maybe where the text is before applying the align center may make a difference? Otherwise, not sure why it didn't work the first time.

Just wanted to throw that in there if others are stuggling with it.
 
Sparrow
We're off to a fantastic start! I will be voting daily, and encouraging my family and friends to do the same! I love that this one doesn't require Facebook or any weird social media broadcasting. Quick, easy, and private.

Even super ill, we can make a difference this way. Thank you to everyone who is voting.
 
snowathlete
283 votes. Back into second place. We've done good so far and it just goes to show what we can achieve, but we need to keep going - keep pushing hard.

Think who else you can tell about this - use it as an excuse to get back in contact with someone you havent spoken to for a while and send them a mail.

This is a major way that we can truely make a difference for our neglected illness. We have some power here to effect change. Strengthening each of our ME/CFS charities should be a principle focus of all of us this year.
 
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