Update on HBforJapan.

Good evening fair gentles.

It's been a while since i updated you guys on what's been going on with the donations.

We are at a little over $7500 in donations, they are definitely slowing down but I plan on taking donations and of course sending out a sticker to thank you for each $5 donation made for as long as people are willing to donate. Hopefully we will reach our $10,000 goal by the end of may.

All donations made up to the 26th of April have been processed and the stickers were sent out as a token of our appreciation for donating through us.

There were several people that didn't list their addresses so i will be emailing you shortly.

We were not able to get chrome to work unfortunately so everybody who asked for a chrome sticker was instead sent a silver sticker and an additional sticker of a different color as a thank you gift for being so patient with us.

There have been several paypal disputes filed and people asking for refunds of their donations, all of these cases were for the reason that they did not receive their sticker(s) soon enough. I would like to clarify one thing, I really do appreciate everybody's donation but i would prefer if you donated because you care about the people in Japan and want to help them, not to get a sticker. We have been doing our absolute best to make the stickers and send them out as quickly and as accurately as possible, however we are human after all so we may have made a mistake on the color or quantity of the stickers we sent to you - if so, please email me at yutaakaishi@gmail.com and I will take care of it as quickly as i can. Also i would like to apologize to those who feel that we did not send your sticker out quickly enough, and appreciate your patience. So i will say this now, please expect up to a month to receive your thank you sticker. However since the initial "rush" is over and we are now receiving five to ten donations a day as opposed to fifty or sixty a day, you are likely to receive them in less than a month's time.

Any reason for donating to the less fortunate is a good reason, but when i set this up - i had assumed that people would be more concerned about where the money is going rather than how quickly they would receive their sticker, judging from the emails i have received, it seems to be the opposite. Perhaps i was naive, but i will continue this project in the same fashion as we have been conducting it: to the best of our ability. I appreciate your donations and your patience.

Concerns about stickers.

So it has been brought to my attention that a few people have been concerned about where the stickers are, and where the money is going to. Well ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly what i will be talking to you guys about tonight. First of all, where are your stickers? To put it simply, probably at a post office or in your mailbox, perhaps it's on the kitchen counter as you read this - your mom is wondering why you have mail from "Hb for Japan" and will ask you about it when you get home from school (don't worry mom, it's not a mail order bride confirmation). All donations made not requesting chrome made previous to the 24th of March have been shipped on Monday. If you did order chrome, i apologize for the delay but please bear with me. I am looking for a way to get chrome to work with me, but although i will do everything in my power to honor existing orders all new orders for chrome will be substituted for silver. I have spoke to a friend of mine who also does stickers and he has offered to do the chrome for me, so I am still waiting on (hopefully good) news from him.

I would also like to talk some numbers here tonight, We have collected over $6000 as of today which is awesome! Now some people have expressed that they were not aware that they would have to wait two weeks for their stickers, to be completely honest - neither did I. I did not expect such generosity from all of you and had not expected the donations to come in as quickly and in the quantities that they did. So here are some numbers for you guys:

$6000

that comes out to 1200 stickers.

It takes roughly 10 minutes a piece to cut, weed, apply contact paper, look up the order on paypal, verify it on the email, package it, and send it out.

That comes out to 12,000 minutes or 200 hours.

which means that if we were to put in 14 hours a day of work we would have shipped the stickers out on Wednesday (which is basically what happened) and we appreciate your understanding that we do have jobs and go to school outside of this project, if taking donations and sending out stickers was my full time job, then i would have no excuse (although i would be working overtime).

Now i am definitely not complaining, I am very glad that we are able to do this for Japan, and i am extremely thankful for all the generous donations that allowed us to do this, if nobody donated we would not have been able to donate our materials, our postage, and most importantly our time. I apologize that I was not able to meet some of your expectations on when you should have received the stickers.

Now i would like to reply to a comment left on this very blog personally, as this fine commenter chose not to leave a email.



I am very very sorry i could not reply to your email immediately. And i also apologize for not posting any info on the stickers being sent out. I was well...really busy making the very stickers that are the subject of your concern. I would really like to reply to each and every email that i receive but chose instead to concentrate all my attention on making the stickers and making sure they were sent out to the correct person, I promise you that i will be replying to your email.

Finally i would like to report to all of you that we will be donating the money to the Consulate General of Japan as soon as we hit the $10,000 mark. But before we go to their office in San Francisco with a hundred one hundred dollar bills (or maybe two thousand fives stuffed into a briefcase) I am contacting every major corporation that i can think of to see if they would like to match our donation, making the absolute most out of your donation.

I appreciate your time, your donations, and thank you for reading this.