Wow. What an exciting event. I was so nervous about going live, on-air for 3 hours! But once we started… we had a blast. We spent those hours wheedling and cajoling the listeners to open their wallets and show us the money!

I think what worked best was being listeners ourselves, we knew that after 2 weeks of hearing about t-shirts or mugs, we were going to avoid talking about them as much as we could. Gretchen, the producer was in the control booth with us. She was silent but very much a part of our team. With a dry erase board and pre-printed que cards, she waved and updated the pledge amounts and important prompts that we needed to focus on. She was like a conductor in front of a symphony. There was lots of arm waving going on in that control room.

World Cafe
Evan and I kept the patter silly and light. But it was meant to look natural. Like we talked about $75 pledge mugs every day. We were on air from 7-9pm and it seemed truly like moments. We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

CarTalk
Early Saturday morning was much easier. I had a bit more confidence and a really looked forward to being silly with my friend, Julie Estey. She’d done this before, so I knew I was in good hands. In fact, we did shine. We had friends calling in from Florida to make their pledge. One call was to pledge “any amount of money to get those two off the air.” Nice friends, eh? Thanks Al and Michelle.

We had folks calling in a pledging money from their dogs. No one was safe from our challenges. I with my friends in the downtown area and some east coasters, and Julie with her dog mushing colleagues. Can you believe that we raised nearly $5000 in one hour?

It was a really great experience and one more example of why I love living this community. You can make a difference.