The Seattle Children's Hospital is holding a telethon on channel 4 June 12th. They have asked us to come on and re-present them with the huge 27,000 check we gave them back in December. We'll have a few minutes to talk about what Child's play did last year and what we're planning on doing this year. If you live in the Seattle area you should tune in on June 12th and check it out.
Child's Play 2004 will be even bigger than last year's effort without a doubt. Last year you asked us if there was anyway you could donate to your local Children's Hospital and that's something we're focusing on for our 2004 Child's Play. We're going to try and get Amazon to actually create a special wish list for us this year that will help streamline the process of donating toys to the Hospital of your choice. Ideally we would like to see a simple drop down list so you can quickly select one of the 20 Children's Hospitals in North America and have your toy shipped off with just a few clicks. First we need to contact each of the Hospitals and make sure they have the ability to deal with the influx of toys. I'm not exaggerating when I say just dealing with the tidal wave of toys is a job in and of itself. Just take a look at the pictures from last year and you can see that it took about twenty volunteers and a semi truck just to get the toys to the Hospital. Then they had to store them in the pool room because it was the only space in the hospital big enough. So we'll be contacting each of the 20 Hospitals soon and explaining what Child's Play is and then get them on board for this year. Once that's done the hard part will be to talk Amazon into constructing a special Child's Play wish list for us that has all the extra features we'll need this year.
Our plan is to kick off Child's Play 2004 at PAX on August 28th. The Seattle Children's Hospital will have a space where you can read about how your donations were used last year and check out some pictures. We'll also be opening up the online wish list at that point so you can start donating for Christmas 2004. If you'd like to bring a new un-opened toy or videogame to PAX with you that would also be much appreciated.
I'll snap some pictures during the telethon on June 12th and post them when we get back. If you haven't looked at the Child's Play site in a while it's worth checking out again. We were all a part of something really special last year and you should all be proud of yourselves. We talked to the Seattle Children's Hospital a few weeks ago and a lot of kids are continuing to benefit every day from the donations you guys made last year. I'm excited to see just what we can do for all the Children's' Hospitals in 2004.
