The Holidays and the Lights that Give Cheer
Welcome to the third installment of the monthly Community Project “newsletter”! In this piece we would generally share info with you on a fun activity to do around our Great Lakes this time of year. And we suggest the following CHRISTMAS LIGHTS displays!
• Holiday Nights in Greenfield Village - Dearborn
• Wayne County Lightfest - Westland
• Christmas at Crossroads Holiday Magic - Flint
• Big, Bright Light Show - Rochester
• Nite Lites – Jackson
• Christmas Lite Show – Grand Rapids
• Wild Lights – Royal Oak
• Light up the Soo – Sault Sainte Marie
For more information on all 8, check out THIS link!
However, while I have your attention, I wanted to give you an update on the Community Project, how we’ve grown, and where we hope to head in the next three months!
To be honest, when we launched on 10/1 the team here had no idea what would happen. We had hopes and we were mostly grounded in reality but it was a new adventure with a lot of ideals. As many of you know, Moosejaw Mountaineering was our first monthly sponsor and through your signups in the month of October, the Community was able to give back to Freshwater Future.
In November we partnered with The Mitten State – One of Michigan’s most iconic small brands. Located in Grand Rapids but heavily involved in the universities and professional sports teams throughout Michigan, TMS offered what we thought was the perfect early starting point for your holiday shopping! We are currently working with the leaders of TMS to decide and give to an organization they support and love.
And this month we are partnering with Traverse City’s own, High Five Threads! HFT is another iconic Michigan brand that designs and prints their products locally in Traverse City. The twist this month is that HFT has expressed an interest in offering 3-4 giveaways throughout the month as a show of support of you, our Great Lakes, and our mission! Pay attention because it’s going to be a great month.
I also wanted to take a minute and address the growing pains we have gone through in the first few months…We have received so much valuable feedback and are so happy that the Community is becoming just that, a community! Hopefully everyone has received an email prompting them to create a password. Once you create the password and sign-in on www.greatlakesproud.com head over to the Community tab and you should have access to everything included in that month’s edition. If you have not gotten an email prompt, email us! Let us know and we’ll make sure to get your account all squared away.
We have also heard that it is easy to miss the monthly email containing the news and information for that month. Well, we heard you there too and starting in December, we will be sending emails out weekly to the Community. Nobody should miss their opportunity to read, get involved, use, or win any longer!
Finally, we are changing our membership pricing structure. Don’t worry, this doesn’t involve any of the existing members and we are still priced at $1/month but due to credit card process fees, we need to offer the membership for 12 months at a time. We realized that we were sacrificing a significant amount of our giving potential by charging members $1 monthly and that had to stop. But again, if you’ve signed up for $1/month nothing is going to change! Although when you encourage your friends to sign up, they will have slightly different options.
And that brings us to the real final point…THANK YOU. Thanks to everyone who has taken this first step with us and made the Community Project into something so quickly. We are shocked by the support so far and look forward to seeing it grow. Don’t forget to share with your friends or even buy them a membership! Our goal is to get to 1k members by the end of March and we can only do it if we are all in this together.
We’ll keep you up to date and make sure our Community $ is being used. You just keep celebrating our lakes and together we’ll see our impact grow!