WE HAVE BEEN CLEARED FOR LAUNCH!

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After several months of planning and assembling a wonderful list of endorsing organizations, we will officially flip the switch tomorrow, Tuesday, April 23, on our crowdsourcing campaign to fund a nationwide bus tour for the 2013-14 school year.

While we had planned on a Kickstarter campaign, they wouldn’t budge from classifying the Tinker Tour as “educational,” a category that unfortunately they don’t currently fund. (We tried to argue that it was also “journalism,” a category they do fund, since we’re going to be doing a lot of blogging, Tweeting, Skyping, etc. — ie., new journalism — as we talk to students and teachers all over the country. But no dice.)

So we’re launching on StartSomeGood.com. (http://www.startsomegood.com/tinkertour) The good news is they have been incredibly helpful and supportive. (You can still talk to real, live people!) The bad news is that they don’t yet have the visibility that Kickstarter does. So we’re really going to be dependent on our supporters to help us get the word out and directing folks to our SSG campaign page.

The really, really good news is that we know we have a Super Secret Ingredient that most others don’t: STUDENTS!!

Students who know how to use the heck out of social media and all the new tools available to take a little tiny project like ours and make it really, really big by sharing it with the world.

Dear Students (and students at heart): We are asking for your help. When our campaign launches tomorrow, please Like Us, Tweet Us (@tinkertour), Pin Us, Put Us in Your Circle, Link Us Up, Instagram a Peace Sign photo to us (#tinkertour), Share Us, Forward our YouTube video, Tumbl Us — you name it, you know what to do much better than us and we want you to do it. As long as you do it with Love. 🙂

In fact, a former Student Press Law Center intern created a special page that will make sharing news of the Tinker Tour a one-click process.

Double bonus if you get word out to someone that might have a reliable bus or RV they’d be willing to donate (with a tax deduction) for a few non-summer months.

Oh…and if you’ve not done so already, please don’t forget to Invite Us.

We will send out a message tomorrow with all of the relevant campaign information. We just wanted to give you a heads-up.

We only have about a month to raise our “tipping point” goal of $50,000 or we get nothing. We’ve been told repeatedly how crucial it is to get out of the gate strong.  It’s been suggested that we have a small core group of people ready to go with donations — big or small — to create some credibility and momentum. If you are receiving this, you are in that core group. Donations start at just $3. And we’ve been told that showing a large number of donors, even at small amounts, is important.

The Tinker Tour is all about the power of student voices. Please, help us show the world what we’re talking about.

Thank you.

Mary Beth and Mike