View the Post on the Blog
View the Post on the BlogSasha asks you (and your friends and family) to VOTE EVERY DAY until Wednesday - this could prove to be a crucial weekend in the Aviva voting contest...
Imagine how long you’d have to stand out on a winter street, rattling a bucket at strangers, until you raised $150,000 for ME, Fibromyalgia and Lyme research. At a generous $50 a day, it would take you more than 8 years.
How fortunate, then, that the same $150,000 is up for grabs in Aviva’s online charity voting competition. All you have to do is click on a website button every day until Wednesday, 12 December. You don’t need Facebook and you can vote from any country.
Join a thundering herd of other supporters and vote for us to win equipment for a research biobank. The biobank scientists aim to get at the cause of our diseases by creating and analysing a collection of blood samples from patients at the Vancouver Chronic Diseases Clinic, a new research and treatment clinic in Canada led by established specialist, Dr Alison Bested. Biomedical research anywhere in the world benefits all of us so do your health a favour and grab that mouse!
Patients have spent many hours recruiting voters, including a large, local network around Vancouver. And it’s paying off: as I’m writing this, we have 3,327 supporters and the number is still rising. We already won an ‘e-badge’ from Aviva for the speed with which we’re gaining voters!
But it’s a tough competition. As we’ve seen in other contests, local projects involving highly Facebooked young people can gather a lot of support. We’re currently in 14th place, and we need to get into the ten to get through to the final, in which Aviva will judge and rank the projects. Every top-ten project gets a prize of $5,000 (four months on that winter street with your bucket). At the end of the last contest, there were only 30 votes between 10th and 11th place so it’s all to play for!
So, vote! Vote every day, especially at the weekend when voting tends to die down and we can steal a march on the competition; get your friends and family to vote; sign up for a daily Facebook reminder or set your computer to remind you daily.
Here’s how to vote
You can see how we’re doing by going to the competition homepage, using the drop-down menu to sort by ‘most votes’ and filter by ‘large’. It’s a bit rough because Aviva aren’t updating in real-time and votes and ranks aren’t entirely consistent, but it will give you an idea.
- Go to our Aviva page.
- Register or sign in, at the top right of the page. You stay signed in for the whole contest, unless you sign out. You can register easily with your Facebook account or register with an easy email verification. Aviva won’t spam you and you only have to register once. Enter your email as directed and choose a password (not the password to your email account!). Press enter, go to your email inbox and look for an email for Aviva. If it’s not there, check your spam folder or come back later: the Aviva site might have been busy.
- Return to the voting page and hit the big blue button that says, ‘Vote!’.
Feel free to join the campaign chat on Phoenix Rising and help cheer everybody on. Forum member Merry has calculated that the ME community has won an amazing $600,000 in online voting contents in the last three years. We can win this, so get voting.
Do it now!
Video explaining how to register and how to vote:
(With thanks to ME Awareness: Words and Pictures)
