A few months ago I became addicted to Instagram, the photo-sharing app on the iPhone and Android operating system. I’ve always loved photography, but I’ve never really excelled at it. I once tried reading the manual for our Canon DSR camera, and my brain started to hurt.
Still, I have beautiful children, and I love capturing their happy little faces. We have tens of thousands of such photos, and some of them are priceless if I do say so myself. So I was thrilled to discover Instagram. With my smartphone I can snap a photo, do a few quick edits, and then post it directly to my Instagram feed, Twitter, and Facebook. It makes sharing photos so much easier, and my family — spread all over the country, and a few overseas — appreciates it immensely, or so their comments at facebook would lead me to believe.
So when it cam time to develop a holiday card for Erwin Penland, the ad agency I work for, the digital team and I discussed the possibility of doing something with Instagram. Ad agencies don’t do traditional holiday cards anymore. That’s boring and expected, and agencies are dead in the water in they simply do the expected. This is a creative business, after all, and agencies wisely take every opportunity to prove their creativity.
But showcasing the agency’s creativity was not our focus this year. After Sandy, we wanted to do something meaningful for people, something that expressed the true spirit of the holidays by helping children in need. But since we would be sending this “card” to our clients and vendor partners, we wanted to involve them in our efforts as well.
The result is Instaclaus, a site that allows you to turn your Instagram photos into Christmas gifts for children in need. Here’s what I wrote at the site to explain how it works.
How it Works
Here in the workshop you’ll find over 100 requests from real children in need, all of whom are from the three cities where Erwin Penland has offices: Greenville, New York and Detroit. You can help “build” each gift by posting a relevant photo to Instagram.
The description above each gift explains the type of photo required. Post your photo with the two requested hashtags, and we’ll add it to the workshop. Once a gift has five photos, we’ll move it to the InstaClaus bag for delivery, with your Instagram handle on the gift tag. A new gift from our queue will move into the workshop, and you can start all over again.
You can only submit one photo per gift, but you can post to as many gifts as you’d like. So the more photos you take, the more we’ll give!
The site has already fulfilled dozens of gifts. Here’s what it looks like when that happens.
There are still gifts to give, so if you’d like to participate, hurry to the site and give it a go. It’s free, fun, and for a good cause.
All Hail Father’s Day
I have amazing kids and an amazing wife. It sounds cliche, but I honestly consider myself the luckiest man alive. My children aren’t perfect of course; we have our share of tantrums and sibling arguments and tears, but so does every family. That’s life. That’s part of growing up and learning. That’s what being a family is: learning to love each other despite our differences.
Father’s Day is probably my favorite holiday of the year. For several reasons. One, it’s all about ME! On Christmas it’s about the kids mostly. We’re celebrating the birth of Jesus of course, but it’s the kids who get all the attention. They get all the presents. And that’s fine. That’s how it should it be. I love seeing the delight on their faces.
But on Father’s Day, it’s all about me. It’s Daddy’s day. Everybody loves Dad and tries extra hard to give him a wonderful, Daddy-focused day.
That makes it better than my birthday. I didn’t do anything to have a birthday. That was my parents’ doing. If we should celebrate anyone on the day of my birth, it should be my mother, who endured quite a bit of labor pains to pop me out. I didn’t do jack.
But becoming a father . . . that’s something I did do. That nine-year-old and seven-year-old and two-year-old and eleven-month-old that are my kids and the joy of my life, THAT I did. And I’m darn proud of those kids. I’m thrilled to be their dad. It’s the greatest honor I have in this life. I love them more than the world itself. They make me extremely happy. And they gave me an amazing Father’s Day.
I got to sleep in. They sang to me. (Happy Father’s Day is exactly like Happy Birthday, in case you didn’t know.) Luke, my nine-year-old, sang me an original song that included beatboxing and lyrics about how awesome I am. My two-year-old Layne, not to be outdone, also sang me an original song, which didn’t make much sense, truth be told, but which was sweet nonetheless. My son Jake gave my a thousand hugs and hung on me awhile. My almost-one-year-old Meggy Moo My wife made me an amazing dinner. AND I got gifts. What father could for more than that?