Growing (Staches) With Our Clients

For the second year in a row, we built the website for the Charlotte Chapter of Mustaches for Kids.  The group was started by Joe Romanelli, president of Romanelli Communications, one of our ad agency partners that uses our content management system for designers.  While we worked on the site last year, we did not participate in the event.

However, Joe used his superior salesmanship this year to get Joel and myself involved in the organization as growers.  So, for the past 4 weeks, we've subjected ourselves to public shame as we grew mustaches.  Joel's could best be characterized as a "trash stache" while mine would more aptly be described as non-existent.

It was a lot of fun to be involved and the organization was extremely successful.  This year the growers raised over $50,000!!  That's not even including matching funds from institutions around Charlotte.  By being the most successful chapter in the nation, M4K Charlotte also won an additional $75,000 from the Knight Foundation to distribute to schoolroom charities around Charlotte.

Not only did we grow staches for the organization, but we also built out some custom features to help engage and excite the growers.  Each grower had the ability to create their own profile on the website.  With the profile, they could easily edit their information and post pictures of their stache's progress.

By integrating with DonorsChoose, a non-profit aimed crowdsourcing funding for projects posted by teachers around the country, visitors were able to visit the M4k website, view growers' profiles, and easily donate to their favorite participant.

The website was a great hit and allowed growers to have full control of their web personas, leading to some very funny profiles.

Congrats again to Mustaches for Kids Charlotte and to all of the "talented" growers and wonderful donors!