I would like to publicly announce that I am working on Fünde Razor, a charity event for Child’s Play Charity. Specifically, I am the event planner for the San Francisco event in December. While I don’t have too much to announce yet, I’ll go into a little background about what the charity event is for and my my role is.

Background

Child’s Play Charity is a foundation created by Penny Arcade to provide video games, toys, and other financial support for children’s hospitals around the globe. The Child’s Play website can tell you more in detail about what they do.

Fünde Razor was founded by Joel Johnson (currently the editor of Boing Boing Gadgets) started Fünde Razor in NYC where Rock Band is played to raise funds and awareness for Child’s Play. Last year the event was in three cities: NYC, Denver, and San Francisco. The other cities run by other bloggers like Brian Crecente (Kotaku), Gawker Media, and Chris Kohler (Wired Game|Life). The idea is to have a nationwide event where all cities have the events on the same night. More cities and more people are involved, but I’ll wait for Joel to make that announcement.

The overall purpose of Fünde Razor is to raise awareness for Child’s Play. Come to the events if you can, but if you can’t, consider donating directly to Child’s Play. This makes the judgement of success less about the returns of the one night, but the overall fundraising goals of Child’s Play.

My Involvement

I attended the San Francisco event last December and as you can see from these photos, it was a great time with a lot of people for the 150 capacity at Shine. It was a fun time, but with a media push on the day of the event, I know that the SF event can hold a much larger audience with some additional planning. I decided to get back to the family “business”* and get back into fundraising.

You can think of Fünde Razor as a sort of franchise arrangement. Joel is the founder and above all things go through him. While we work as a team, each city’s planners are working on their own cities. We share resources, but each event has their own uniqueness due to the local and the venue they have.

The past few months I’ve been in talks with Joel and the rest of the Fünde Razor crew. My involvement is specifically is with the San Francisco event in getting the venue, planning the activities for the event, and other things around the actual event in San Francisco. I will need help in running the various aspects of the event itself, but my roll is to make sure the larger parts of the event are planned and managed with a small staff executing the plans. Not that I’m hands-off, but I can’t do everything. Chris Kohler is also a partner in the SF event and handling more of the corporate communications aspect of the event.

My goals for this year’s SF event include increasing the number of attendees and establish the event as a large, yearly event. This means advertising at least a month or two in advance along with a larger venue and more activities. In addition, I want to activate not only gamers and Rock Band players in the area, but have more participation with all the game studios in the Bay area. At the minimum getting people working at these studios to show up; Bonus for helping to sponsor the event. Though I help here and there, the corporate communications are being done by others in the group. If you know of an organization that would be interested, pass them along to me.

Want to help?

Right now I’m attempting to lock down the venue and date. I’m in talks so I can’t reveal more details than that at the moment. Once we get the venue, date settled and talks with sponsors firmed a little more, I will need a few people willing to be in charge of specific aspects of the event. These positions will be higher-level management that will start working early on. Someone in charge of the main Rock Band stage, for example. Someone in charge of managing all volunteers. Upper-level stuff.

We’ll also need a small army of volunteers who will staff various things for the event. Hopefully we can get a sizable number so no one person is working more than two hours for the event. That call won’t happen till a month or less before the event.

Once we start having these positions open, you’ll all know.

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* My family and I have worked for various charities throughout the years including Festival of Trees for Detroit Children’s, my High School’s auction, etc. It’s not an established consulting business, we’ve simply done a lot of work in the field.