First, solutions.
I used dice rolls on BoardGameGeek to determine the winners; more detailed results on how many entries each person got are available here, but here is a summary of the winners:
Bonus prize (Norinori 1): Joanna Cheng (prize received!)
Puzzle 1 (Shakashaka 1): Kevin Petrychyn*
Puzzle 1 (Daily Puzzle): Joseph DeVincentis* (prize received!)
Puzzle 2 (Fresh Sudoku 2): Joshua Zucker
Puzzle 2 (Daily Puzzle): Edderiofer (prize received!)
Puzzle 3 (LITS 1): Michael Shafer**
Puzzle 3 (Daily Puzzle): Bryce Herdt
Good prize: James McGowan
Grand prize: Michael Shafer
*Bryce Herdt and Matt Lahut were also accidentally awarded prizes in drawings that were set up incorrectly; I will give them these prizes nonetheless, because I already sent them excited notifications of their wins before I realized the error.
**Jeffrey Harris won this prize initially, but chose to give it to another random person because he already owns a copy of LITS 1. I have a substitute prize planned for him. . . .
Final thoughts:
Damn, only $132.98 for Jack Vasel Memorial Fund? That's enough money for me to make puzzle 601 giant, but that's it. I was looking forward to much more momentum than this. (Sanctuary Home for Children received $206, and Child's Play Charity received $237.95.) I refuse to leave things off on such a low note – next year, I'm going to host ChipIn for Children's Charities II, and retain my same $2,500 goals! But what do I need to do to get there?
The sad reality is that I'm too small for the bigger charities to spend time promoting; Tom Vasel is a busy man, and Child's Play Charity has video game marathons that raise money far in excess of my meager goal. As for Sanctuary Home, I'm not really sure.
I think one thing I should do next year is mooch of Mario Marathon. They have a system where you can set up a donation widget on your site, and it tracks which donations came via your site. If I take advantage of this system, people can donate to Child's Play via the marathon using my link, and I'll have a record of their donation to determine how many prize entries they get. (As a bonus, they can win Mario Marathon prizes, too!) This money won't be added to the ChipIn widget, but I can compute the sum of two amounts manually for the purposes of donation incentives such as the giant puzzles.
I also need to do more to facilitate offline donations; PayPal seems, to my vast surprise, not to be as ubiquitous among my offline friends as it is online (where it's just a fact of life and how every furry artist and every puzzle community person and every board game person accepts payments, pretty much). I received $25 worth of donations from offline donors, which I put towards JVMF, the charity which needed it the most. Aside from that, I only recognize one ChipIn donor as an offline friend, despite my efforts to promote the event via the bonus puzzle flier; nobody that I know offline tweeted about it or solved the puzzles, either. Abilene is the worst city for getting people involved in my online stuff; I'm going to need to get more invested in collecting offline donations and either donating them via the ChipIn or (to avoid tax complications and to allow for checks) sending these donations off directly and adding their amounts manually to the ChipIn totals to determine what giant puzzles to make.
Come on, puzzle community! You're my target audience! What do I need to do next year to reach the $2500 totals and make ChipIn for Children's Charities the most amazing thing the puzzle community has done in the history of history? (Or is that even possible? The puzzle community is kinda sorta a niche, and not a rich one, judging from what I've heard about puzzle competition prizes. . .)
