Eyeglass and Contact Lens Donation: Lens Lady

Bless the Wolf family

lenslady — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:42:07 +0000

Our founding organization, Sea Island, brought in David Wolf to join our group, which is an absolute blessing. Even his father Richard has been helping to address the next steps for us to take in spreading our word in the world.

It feels like we might be able to speed things up, but David’s pretty insistent that we have some significant challenges in order to really reach out to the audience we’re looking for (it appears that the internet is actually a pretty hard place to meet the millions of people we want to reach). He’s also pointed out that none of our group has much experience in fund raising or donation drives, so now we’re looking for someone to help with this…I hope we find someone! In the meantime, I guess we’ll wait and see.

Getting the word out

lenslady — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:40:54 +0000

I live in Colorado, in the heartland of the United States, near the Rocky Mountains. That means I’m pretty far away from the international cities and culture like what’s in New York or London (I rarely hear another language other than Spanish). But still, it seems like we know just enough folks to truly get good translations for our international message. I asked for help with French, Korean, Russian and Hebrew today, which should be good.

I speak just enough Spanish and German to at least know that our message is coherent in those languages…After we do this a few times, we’ll follow through with the other languages, like Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. It’s just nice to see how people are willing to help us with our mission. It feels pretty good!

Contact Lens Google Scam!

lenslady — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:00:09 +0000

I just finished a session of researching contact lenses online, and was extremely disappointed to discover that half of the top 10 results at Google for all things contact lens are actually the same company, shallowly disguising itself for no reason other than to take the ranks at the search engines.

Is this legit? I mean, it doesn’t seem right that nearly identical sites, with identical content and prices, and identical addresses and telephone/fax contact information, are allowed to dominate the search results. It seems like a violation of free speech through search engine corruption. And it makes it five times harder for us to get our message out!

The sincerely questionable sites are Just Lenses, Lens.com, Contacts America and 1-800 Get Lens. Not cool guys, not cool.

WordPress, LiveJournal and international blog platforms

lenslady — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:12:30 +0000

We’re trying to establish a firm social media presence in support of our eyeglass mission. So, naturally, this requires a presence at the most important blog venues, including WordPress here as well as Lens Lady on LiveJournal.

Hopefully the messages we promote are going to help raise awareness for eyeglass donation internationally. I also really like the platform made available at blog.com and its international sites (we’re present now in Canada, including Viviti and Bravenet, and the UK, Ireland, German, French and Spanish).

Also, I joined Xanga and Squidoo. Personally, I’m not really much of an internet socialite, but perhaps being there will raise awareness for eyeglass donation, especially in the U.S. where Americans dispose of 10 million usable pairs of eyeglasses every year. I like Squidoo, and interestingly enough, the blogs are called “lenses”…perhaps there’s something to this!

One month in, and so far so good!

lenslady — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:35:55 +0000

Today marks the first month of our projects. So far so good – we’re actually about a week ahead of schedule, and with some more manpower than we expected to have. There are so many good people out there who want to help! We might just stay ahead of the plan.

I started looking at what we’d hoped to accomplish in January and February next year, and now I’m hoping we might be able to finish most of those projects by the end of this year (before I go on Christmas vacation someplace warm).

Building a store to help donation? Hmmm…

lenslady — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:38:23 +0000

David had us join some of the eyewear merchant “affiliate programs” in order to open new opportunities for potentially raising funds to support our growth. After all, just the hosting for our websites is expensive, and the envelopes and fliers simply aren’t free.

I’d never thought about having a store before, but I do hope the store will take care of us and help us grow.

Lens Lady identity created!

lenslady — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:33:37 +0000

Big thanks to Randy, a local artist who built our first corporate identity on donation. We like the little fellow he made much more so than the Microsoft Office version of the bouncing eyeglasses. Hopefully he’ll be recognized and loved by people across cultures.

Recycle your Eyeglasses and Contact Lenses

lenslady — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:30:14 +0000

Please support eyeglass donation, and visit the Lens Lady’s contact lenses and Eyeglasses site.