Well, we took our best shot at this. You all did a great job of trying to pull together large groups of voters. Some of the people that were in the top ten have been at things for decades, and have HUGE networks of people to move towards an idea. All said, rating where we did out of 729 possible choices was pretty damn good.

So we didn't win the award. How many people do you think we got exposed to the words "oral cancer" through this effort that were completely unaware of this disease? Spreading awareness is one of our core missions, and this certainly helped that.

I was particularly impressed with some of the ideas that people put out there, like Eric who has some clear marketing background hidden in there somewhere. I want to thank you all for trying to make this happen.

Pepsi automatically enrolls groups in subsequent months competitions. I think that we should not make any effort to work on the next go around of this. There are several reasons. One is that unlike the Great Non-Profits effort, you have to come back everyday for a month to try to make something happen. To be honest this marketing ploy by Pepsi to get you to see their name and logo every day in a row for 30 days is really asking a lot of people. Also we have no idea published by Pepsi, if one person or a thousand people voted for us each day, or how far behind the others we were at any point in time. Obviously this is by design.... but I think the design stinks.

Lastly I don't want to burn out those that have stepped up for OCF time and time again to help us with things. Another month of this will just burn people out on something we will likely still be far away from having, when I would rather be able to ask them for some other kind of assistance down the road, and not have them feeling like it's a " oh no, not another OCF thing again" when we do.

I thank you all for giving it your best shot, and for being there for OCF once again. This won't be the last thing to come along, and next time perhaps things will turn out better. So even though the foundation will be automatically enrolled in the next voting session - Please let this next one go. There will be other opportunities down the road.

Brian, stage 4 oral cancer survivor. OCF Founder and Director. The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.