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HPS hits 1,000!

As many of you know, the Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome Network is one of the charities at www.goodsearch.com. This search engine runs off of the same search engine that powers Yahoo! and for every search done with the HPS Network selected as the benefiting charity, we get a penny.

Just a penny you might say? Pennies add up fast. Last night we hit the 1,000 mark on searches done on behalf of the HPS Network. Granted – this is hardly a big pile of cash. It’s $10. Yet I see potential in this very, very simple fundraiser.

How long does it take, after all, to do two searches a day on a search engine, even if you don’t even really want to find anything? Surely there must be something you could look up on any given day?

It’s something anyone with internet access can do for HPS in less than 30 seconds a day. And those pennies would add up if everyone helped spread the word! Think about it.

If we could get 100 people to do two searches a day, we’d earn $730 in a year. That could cover a hotel room at the HPS Family Conference for a newly diagnosed family that couldn’t afford to come otherwise.

If we got 500 people to do two searches a day, we’d earn $3,650. That’s enough to bring several families to the HPS Family Conference, or buy a booth at a medical trade show such as the American Thoracic Society or CHEST to help educate doctors about Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome.

If we could find 1,000 people to do two searches a day, we could earn $7,300. And, (now I’m dreaming here) if we could find 10,000 people to do two searches a day we could earn $73,000 a year! Imagine what we could do with that kind of cash!! The HPS Network is busting at the seams. We need paid staff and we need them badly! The thing slowing us down the most on the road to finding a cure is a lack of full time staff. Just answering phone calls from families and dealing with the day-to-day crisis management is a full time job. With that kind of cash, we could think about hiring someone to help Donna so we could use her medical knowledge more strategically. I can’t stress enough how much Donna needs an assistant!

Think about the number of friends and family we all have. We’re only asking for 30 seconds a day to help find a cure. It doesn’t even involve writing a check. We all have co-workers, family and friends. Surely we could all find people willing to give us 30 seconds of their day to help us – the time of the average TV commercial.

Some ideas to help spread the word:
· Send out an e-mail to your friends and family and tell them about
www.goodsearch.com.
· Put a tagline on your personal e-mail promoting
www.goodsearch.com.
· Include a note about
www.goodsearch.com in your Christmas cards this year.
· Make a poster about
www.goodsearch.com and find a place to hang it at your work place, local watering hole or church.

Remember, you don’t need a PhD to search for the cure!

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