Funding - a dscussion document?!

[Veritee]

Hi Everyone

Forum and site users and members

We have received our first and only donation and I felt this might be a good time to fill site users in on the funding situation. This donation was from a man and I am truly grateful for it as it has spurred me on to look at the funding situation again and has given me a bit of a boost of energy to try again.

This will be a long ramble of a post or posts - I just felt I wanted to tell users of the forum how this thing actually works financially.

Please do not feel that by doing this I am trying to ask you to donate or use our web hosting.

If any of you would want to do this - of course we would be very pleased, but really there is absolutely no requirement to contribute financially in order to use the forum, email partners or to contact me.

I just wanted to let you know the position fully as while we have no formal management committee, the site users are in essence our users committee - we do have advisors however and if anyone wants to know who they are please e mail me.

Current Financial Position:

My husband and I have funded the site ourselves since it first started in one form or another for about 9 or 10 years now. At first any money needed to run it came out of my wages, this included our internet connection which in those early days we probably would not have had otherwise and at first in the 90s was expensive and paid for by the minute.

Up until my accident in 2003 I worked either full or half time so could afford to fund this at the expense of other things.

However I had a long recovery period from the surgery and I still do not feel able to work and I am awaiting a further operation to fuse my leg to my ankle to give me more mobility as I can only walk on crutches and then not very far.

Because of this my husband now funds the site entirely .

If I never again manage to earn an income of my own and if we never get any financial help we will continue to fund the site do so for as long as we can, but if we do not get any funds to continue with our own hosting space this may mean - if it has not worked out by the end of the year, going back to a cheaper less extensive solution and downsizing what we do for the site and generally for PNI.

However my husband is doing a very difficult and dangerous job which takes him away from the family for many weeks at a time in at sea in what are deteriorating whether conditions.

We feel that now he is in his 50s we can not continue like this for more than 2 years maximum. If my husband leaves the sea as there is no work for his skills here in rural Cornwall and although he will do his best to find work – he is what used to be called a ‘proper working man’ and I do not see him ever retiring fully - our income will drop to the floor and when this happens I doubt is we can continue to fund the site ourselves.

Actual Current Costs:

When the site first started the costs were manageable and a maybe a justifiable part of our family expenditure as I had the site on free web space provided by my ISP.

So the costs were for the ISP, the software to maintain and write the site and the extra phone calls generated from the site.

For different reasons this became no longer suitable and the site was moved to paid for hosting and more recently a full hosting package was bought to provide more features and space.

This is not actually that expensive - around £200 plus a few extras for domain name, e mail etc - a year and I was hoping that I as we have a lot of free space to fund this by charging a very reasonable fee to put others web sites up on the space.

But I actually only have 2 paying customers so far, and we would only need a few more to pay for the site hosting.

(so if any of you have a web site you want to put on an independent server it will cost you from about £25 a year if you write your web site or have an existing one. In fact all the prices are negotiable, so just ask)

We also pay for our chat room facility - which no one now seems to use, and we have a few small extra costs.

However we do have hidden additional expenses which we would not incur as a family if we did not run this site.

We have a massive phone bill due to phone calls made in relation to this work. Nearly every call I make in the day is in someway connected with this site, either to obtain information and advice so I can do I can best answer posts and e mail enquiries, or to try to network, get funding and keep communication with others working in this field and have knowledge in this field.

Although I do not run a telephone help line there are always at any one time 2 or 5 women I support personally that I have met either through this site or have been referred to me via APNI.

We also found that due to the rural area that I live it became impossible to run and maintain the site on dial up connection. This is because we could not get anywhere near the dial up speeds that many take for granted - we averaged about 20 bps - and due to line noise (apparently) our connection would be dropped several times a day.

We are in an area that did not have broadband until last month so for 2 years we have paid for a one way satellite connection, which was quite costly. I would not have needed this for the few family e mails we get and the occasional surf of the net for information, but running the site made this essential if only to prevent me going mad with frustration with paint-drying-slow-loading-speeds and dropped connections!

However we now have ADSL, which is 2 ways and it really has made my life much easier. However we are at the very outside of the distance to the exchange that such a service can be viable.

Therefore we have had to use BT which although more expensive, they own the lines and this way we know we can get an engineer more quickly if things break down. We have also had to take out the more expensive business package to guarantee speeds – I think it is £29.99 a month; even so my ADSL is not stable as it drops several times a day and I have to reset everything to get back online.

But this is a hundred times better than it was on a dial up!!

Other hidden costs are ink for printing leaflets and correspondence, software to write the web site - which costs in the hundreds and has to be upgraded every few years.

Maintenance on equipment and new equipment and massive amounts of hard disk space to archive the forum and keep information other records for PNI.org.


continued below

[Veritee]

Conferences and Training:

We would also like to go to a few conferences and training etc or send others from the site or forum.

For instance to send just one person to the recent Marce conference recently would have cost £200 for delegate registration, another £29 to go to the opening reception, at least £150 fro accommodation for one person in Oxford and if the delegate had been me as I am disabled I would have had to pay more for the facilities I need, and then it would have been at least another £30 to £100 for travel, again from Cornwall, the higher figure and food maybe £30 to £50.

Approximately £500 for one person to attend one conference!!!!!

We considered it but we simply could not afford it and I would have not have wanted to go alone so the costs would have doubled if I had taken someone else.

My husband and I did in the end consider going for just one night which would halve the costs and not register for the actually conference but only for the formal meeting

(which was where our Debs from the forum was speaking and I would have liked some of us to have gone to support her) This cost £10 only but we still would have had accomodation, travel and food costs.

As it happened I could not go anyway as the Channel 5 thing that I was committed to came up on the same days, but I would have liked to have had the money to send someone instead.

Why are conferences and training important?

Going to such things I feel is important because from running this site we have accumulated so much information from the women the site supports about what the main issues and concerns actually are for women with PNI rather than what health professionals think our concerns to be.

By attending conferences and training we could give women with PNI a voice, straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, but without ill and suffering women with PNI struggling individually to make their needs heard.

In addition I think that from running this site we know some things or have a perspective that perhaps the professionals don’t, such as the predominance of what we call on hear ‘bad or scary thoughts’ the fact that for many women depression is not a significant feature of PNI yet the psychiatric service in general consider PNI to be exactly the same as clinical depression, what it really is about to have PNI and what treatment and facilities would help us most

Plus many other bits of information that I have collected and indeed archived as proof or substantiation over the years.

I would like us to have a forum and voice to be able to pass this information on to those who make decisions about funding and treatment for PNI . Conferences and training courses would be a venue for this but to go to them or indeed hold them cost money we do not have.

As we could not be there at the Marce I believe Debs - Deborah Morgan-Graham - did a wonderful job at the Marce conference in our absence to represent our work, women with PNI and that of many other small organisations that can not afford to go to such conferences.

She has been asked to become part of the decision making process of the Marce which is a very important organisation in terms of promoting the needs and treatment of women with PNI and prenatal health in general.

I know Debs will continue to represent us, but would have liked this web site ( and in fact I personally would have liked to have gone) also to be part of this conference and other conferences like it in the future - as were thousands of medical professionals and other workers who were funded to attend by their employers or funding bodies – but we could not even afford to send one delegate!

In the absence of being able to attend such things I am trying to assemble the information I have archived into a form that I can use for a synopsis for a book to try to get a book published as I feel is the only other way I can pass this archive on.

However I find it a very lonely and isolating task and one I have no experience in – so I have not yet got very far.

Grant Funding or Sponsorship.

Obviously if we need money to continue the site at first glance it would seem that grant aid would be the way to go, or sponsorship.

However this has always caused me with difficulties because of worried about funders or sponsors putting conditions on their money which would be detrimental to the site!

What do others think???

The sort of areas I am talking about are the fact that at present we feel we can listen to absolutely anything that any woman will say on the site without taking action, unless that woman wants us to. The rule is we never intervene unless directly asked to.
By this I mean, action or intervention outside the site or forum.

Of course I will respond on the forum or even if I feel it would be best privately by e mail, in any way I feel is suitable and so will any site helpers, but we NEVER take any outside action, we never contact doctors, HV, friends, even social service or police, etc whatever a woman says on the forum unless asked to

This is a very fundamental condition of running the site which we stick to absolutely!!! But is one I know that unless we had political and celebrity clout, any funder would find problematic.

I would probably be criticised for this, but I feel it has to be followed absolutely otherwise where do you draw the line at when you intervene? More to the point the women on the site would not feel safe as they would not know where the line for PNI.ORG was.

This actually means that if a woman on the site said she had (this is only an example of one of the worse things I feel could happen) just killed maimed or was about to take such action, someone else including herself or her child/ren we/I would not contact anyone or take any action unless the woman concerned agreed to this or asked us to.

This is a very difficult and potentially dangerous - for me personally – guideline to stick to and to my knowledge only two other organisations have this policy, the Samaritans and Childline.

In a recent court case The Samaritans right to do this was upheld in court when they prosecuted an employee counsellor who had broken such a confidence because he could not cope with what he had been told.

However The Samaritans and Childline are long established, with lots of backing from very influential people. We have no backing from anyone with any clout and all my attempts to get this have failed so to apply and get grant funding or sponsorship would for this site carry the risk that we could no longer follow this policy.

At the moment the position is basically I think that myself and my husband could be prosecuted or sued personally if this policy led to a death or some other horrible consequence - a possibility we are totally prepared to carry – but what funder would be prepared to fund such an unknown and little supported organisation as PNI.org when there is even the remotest possibility of being connected with consequences of our policy in this?

Anyway despite this last year and up to a couple of months ago I began to look into the possibility of finding or sponsorship.

As a qualified youth and community worker this area is not new to me and in the past I have successfully formed charities and funded for such diverse things as, a single parents group, two a youth projects one very major in North End Road part of inner city London, a village hall, two skate parks, play areas and play equipment and community facilities.

I am well informed on how to get grant aid and become a charity etc but have no knowledge of getting anything but local sponsorship from local business.

TEXTI therefore put a lot of effort last year and some of this into the process of getting proper funding for the site.

I spent some time and a lot of my energy when I was not yet fully well writing aims and objectives, a constitution, finding advisors and networking to get support for the project.

I did have some success in that I made an out line grant aid application for section 64 funding and it went into the second stage and I truly believe that we had a very good chance of getting this funding.

continued below

[Veritee]

Funding Failures and Networking Failures

However I really failed in the areas that were the most important. I failed at networking as almost without exception all the organisations and individuals I contacted were either completely disinterested or seemed to be puzzled as to why a woman running what was percived to be a personal home page web site, was contacting them or thought the site would be of any interest to them.

There was little or no offer of exchanges of information, or inclusion of PNI.org in any meetings, training of conferences.

In fact I mostly drew a complete blank.



I was very disheartened but I did have a little success with a few personal contacts who either knew me form my previous work as a youth worker or on a personal level, or from when I suffered PNI myself. Responses from some of these people were positive but since then they have without exception played no active role or even contacted me about PNI.org again.

Some of these people are I know very busy and important people now – one for instance very high up in Cornwall Social Services, she has given her verbal support however, but has no time to contribute until next year

Individually I understand completely why they can not take an active role, but nevertheless the lack of any positive feedback or any resulting ongoing interest and networking, left me feeling defeated and crushingly isolated in what I was trying to do.

I also tried to contact personalities to get their support such as Melinda Messenger, Esther Rantzen, and quite a few others and more recently the author Anna Pasternak.

Without exception not one ‘personality or celb ’ has ever got back to me not even with a standard thanks but no thanks type of reply!

I was not asking for money from any of these people – only their support in principle and perhaps to name them as supporters on the web site.


I must admit that most of my attempts to contact these people were done by e mail. Mostly because I run a web site and I try to do everything electronically due to my belief that this is the future and it saves paper and the environment.

Also mostly it was hard if not impossible to track down a mail address for them or even an e mail address so I contacted the media for which they had worked for recently – for instance the Daily Mail and Radio 2 for Anna and Radio 2 and another paper for Melinda and asked them to pass on my e mail. Some of these papers did get back to me and say they had passed my correspondence on.

But to date I have had no response from any of my attempts to contact any ‘personality’

Again I felt I had failed the site and its members and felt disheartened.


The other important area in which I failed was to get together a local management committee.

I am well used to forming charities and getting finding but to do this one has to have a management committer who can meet up on a regular basis. As an internet based group the users of the facility are geographically spread as are any of the site supporters.

To be a management committee these people do not have to be local to each other but if not they would all have to have the time and money to travel regularly to meetings and PNI.org has no money for this or anything else.

It is a chicken and egg thing - if we could get funding we could have a management committee but until we have a management committee we can not get funding!!!



Because of this fact I then pulled out the stops and contacted absolutely anyone I thought may have enough of an interest in the issue to attend at least enough management committee meetings to just get the funding off the ground!

I felt quite bad about dong this is some cases but I contacted local women over the years who I had supported personally through APNI, I contacted ex – work colleagues from the youth service.

I told everyone everywhere I went about trying to get a management committee together, I tried to rope in friends, who while most had never had PNI at least might help me out of friendship to sustain a management committee long enough to become a charity and get basic grant aid or sponsorship.

While I really mostly met with failure again, at one point I did have hope that I might get together a group of at least 8 people willing to meet regularly on a management committee in order to at least establish PNI.org as a registered charity.

However as time went on all these people dropped out, each for their own reasons:



I totally understand these reasons why they all dropped out.

I think I made a mistake in trying to recruit the management committee from either ex –sufferers who were not yet ready, or very busy professionals.

I am not saying that an ex suffferer could not be on the management committtee in fact I see no reason why - if they wanted to - a current sufferer of PNI could not be on the committee, it was just I think I presuraised women who did not actuallly want to do it.

Ex sufferers, quite often in my experience - do not want to have anything to do with PNI after recovery as to do so stops them form moving on so for this reasons some of the local ex sufferers I recruited in principle dropped out for this reason and others unfortunately found themselves feeling unwell again and so did not feel they could commit to such a commitment.

Others who I had contacted for different reasons, they were either professionals or , people I had worked with or knew of through my contacts who had the skills and perhaps the interest.

However they all gradually ceased to contact me or dropped out of any active participation also through lack of time,interest etc.

While I understood the individual reasons this left me feeling abandoned, isolated and disheartened.


I found all this lack of success in the funding area was having an effect on my self-esteem sanity and self confidence.

After all I have had an accident which has knocked me for six and then had been totally unsuccessful in getting recognition, support, interest and ultimately funding for a project which is very important to me personally.

Yet in the past I had been very successful in getting these things for projects through my work as a youth and community worker. I just could not understand why I had failed so much?

However I realise now that I had always worked in the past with the backing of a local authority or established local or national organisation behind me.

I had never before tried to get support or fund raising in isolation, with no personal face to face contact with anyone to bounce ideas off and no one to interact with personally on a day to day basis and to discuss the issues and make decisions with as to what directions to pursue.

I am a team worker not and individual one and without a team I could not be effective. I also feel that the very issue if PNI is a difficult one to get funding for.

The general public seem to think it affects the minority and the treatment and support offered via the GP, HV is adequate and all that is needed and so why does a project like PNI.org need funding?

Rightly or wrongly I found this failure to be a personal blow and so for my own sanity a couple of months ago I gave up trying and went back to just doing my best to support women personally who use the site.

I withdrew to lick my wounds


The Future


Despite this failure I still have not given up hope of getting a management committee together, then finding funding and eventually that PNI.org can become more than a web site forum.

In my most fantasy moments my vision is I hope that PNI.org can become a project like Childline but for women with PNI!

That we could train, write leaflets and books and that PNI could have paid counsellorswho were ex sufferers on the forum, chat room and perhaps even phones 24/7 and able to offer non – judgmental help and counselling and a listening ear to those thousands of women in the UK and thousands more throughout the world who have PNI - a service which would bring the help to where it is needed, to women in crisis, in the middle of the night when they are dealing alone with a screaming child and into their own homes via the web and the phone

( empire building or what?)

In my normal more down to earth moments I would be happy just to get a regular few hundred a year to keep this forum running and perhaps expand in a small way.

Well I have brought everyone up to date on the funding and publicity.


What do people think? – does anyone have any ideas how I can go forward on this?

One thing I really need for my own sanity so I have people to work with and for the practicalities of getting charitable status is a management committee – has anyone any suggestions on this or how to get celebrity/personality support or how to get sponsorship or other funding?

However I will not expect any replies – I wrote this for your information on what the funding situation is rather that for a response but I would be pleased to hear from you

All the best

Veritee

[yorkslass]

Dear Veritee


I want to help you in any way I can But i am not sure how I can help.

I did earlyer this year myself contact many celebraties with the same idea as you not to ask for funding just there suport and a look on the forum but like you I had ZERO replies.

I wish I could help more and if i can just ask and I am there for you Veritee always you have been such a support to me


Your freind
Melx

[Veritee]

Thanks Mel

I know you would help. Thank you for trying to get Celbs interested - I wonder why we get no response? I guess they have lots of people e mailing them every day and we are just Pam mail to them - I doubt they actually get round to reading what we say?

I am sure that if you were near enough you would join a management committee.

In fact to get it off the ground in finding funding to have people available for more time etc it only needs a working management committee as once we had this I am sure we would get funding.

I have decided to have a rest till after Christmas and then give it another go in the New Year.

All the best

And thanks

Veritee

[jimmy riddle]

hello all i am the man who made the donation .. i am unemployed . me and my wife just had twins and we get no benefits of any kind from the dss and i still found a donation and i also offered to donate the same amount monthly which i still feel is to little for the support i received from this site .. so i say if you benefit from the info why not donate something to help with the costs ... its worth it guys .. john

[tinkabell]

i think you need to get across to people who need your help and they in turn will help to keep te site here. For example do you have a poster i could put up in my local clinic this sit is invalauble and i found it by accident. not everyone has a computer but if they know about the site they could find a computer.
What about organising a sponsored event that anyone who uses the site could do in their own area ie. swim,walk,silence ( that will be easy for those of us with PND)
I dont know if there is a Surestart in your area i think its nationwide now but they support families of children under 5 surely this site in their interest. Our local surestart has monies known as community chest that they give with no conditions to local groups. Alternatively what about the PM or his wife they profess to be family orientated could they not help? Sorry if these are all useless or been tried already.

[Veritee]

Hi tinkabell

Thank you for your welcome comments.

This will be a long reply so I hope you will bear with me but the issues you raise are important and I feel I should expand them for others on the forum.

I do in fact have both a poster and a leaflet that I can send to anyone who wants it to put up locally. They are in MS Publisher format but I can make it in pdf and word if needed - do you want me to send them to you? If so e mail me, I will also get round to publishing them on the main site.

I think it would really help the site to get recognised if members would print the posters and leaflets off and put them up locally to them and perhaps show them to their HV and CPNs GPs etc.

This could really be a start to getting funding.
I think you are right in there need to get across, that those who use the site are the ones who can keep it going. While this site did start around 1996/7 as my home page and is called Veritee's I have only kept this as it lends a personal touch that always seemed to have been helpful. However I have long seen the site as a cooperative effort and it has long been so, with me acting as co-ordinator and giving continuity while others have popped in and out in their level of participation and commitment as their own needs change.

I would however love others to become as permanent as myself in keeping this site going. However I feel it may be the nature of PNI that as people recover their needs, priorities and interests change so I recognise that I may have to stay the continuity for the forum and site.

However any offers to join me are welcome and yes a sponsored event would be really great!!!


I hate to throw this back on you - but would you be willing to organise such a thing ie decide on the nature of the event and date, make the forms, send e mails and forms to members etc? If you can not perhaps someone else would be willing to take this on. I will help ie I have the ability to send e mails to all members etc.

The event could just be anything anyone wanted to do on a certain day - I could do a sponsored walk on crutches for instance!!!

As to surestart, there is indeed a surestart near me who do rum 2 PNI groups. Not in my local town as it is not deemed a sure start area of need, but in a couple of towns around 8 miles away from me each.

AC who posts on the forum is a member of one of the groups and in fact I have a couple of acquaintances who work for sure start one quite high up I think as the area co-ordinator in Falmouth.

However while I have visited one of the groups and was made welcome, I have not been successful at all in getting surestart to offer any kind of practical or financial support for the forum or the site, or even to include me in its mailing list of other organisations or help me with training. I have indeed talked at length to the acquaintance who is a coordinator on one occasion but her reaction was a bit like ‘ very interesting but what has this to do with me’ This surprised me as I feel PNI has everything to do with an organisation that works to enhance the lives of preschool children and their parents.


Continued below

[Veritee]

Continued

I think also one of the problems is my site is for sufferers in all areas and also I myself do not live in a surestart area even though there are surestart areas not far away.

I live in a very rural area deemed to be middle class and without problems and the local town in our area is Navy Air force town and never qualifies for government community and issue funding. In fact when I was a youth worker for Cornwall County Council all my work until the last year when I did get work in Helston, was done in the areas that surestart works within.

This is because these areas are ex mining areas and the mining has gone leaving a poverty/employment gap.

Also these areas are traditionally working class areas while where I live takes in places such as Helford, Coverack, Mullion, Penrose and the lizard in general which has more than its fair share of resident millionaires and celebrities. Members of the Who and other bands are sait to live there, and I believe even Richard and Judy but ironically I have no way of finding out where any of them live!!


As to the sure start Community Chest. No I did not know about this, it may be because I am not in a surestart area the forum may not be eligible. I will give it a go however.

I think I have difficulty getting over to other government funded or rum organisations that this site/forum is running a well used and in many ways professional and responsible service which is more than just one woman’s home site.

This in fact is the crux of my difficulties in getting grant aid funding – for some reason despite the fact I treat co-ordinating this site as seriously and as professionally as I treated being a professional youth worker for over 20 years, I think it is eary days in the world of effective online support groups and they are not generally taken seriously as an effective service which runs with stated policy, ethics aims etc and thus are as legitimate to fund as say a surestart group where the members meed physically once a week!

I will continue to work to change this – but until I can get some kind of breakthrough I think the only answer ios for members to participate in some way in keeping this site going, either by fundraising as you suggest, personal donations an/or working on the site as moderators or just continuing participation.

There are actually many other jobs that could be done – I need someone to archive the forum posts for instance a menial and long task but one I really feel needs to be done.
As to the PM – yes I have often thought about this as you are right they do profess to be interested in family matters.

What about if I drafted a letter to the PM and sent it to all members of the forum and asked you each to alter it to take account of anything you wanted to say personally and then each of us send it on to the PM and your MP

What do people think???

I am not suggesting that such a letter would be about this site/forum but about the issue of PNI itself - the fact that it is more common than is recognized by society and Health professionals, that essential facilities to treat it is not generally available in all areas such as Mother and Baby Units, specialists such as perinatal consultants ( there are none in Cornwall) and specialist PNI health workers and HV CPNs GPs with training in PNI . We could also point out the lack of funding for self help support groups such as this forum and face to face local groups and that there is a need to have these kinds of support as well as that offered by health professionals.

Personally I would also like such a letter to cover the often poor response women seeking help for PNI in an emergency and routinely often get and without naming anyone, use examples from the forum – I mean when women have asked for help when feeling in crisis and have either got nothing or just medication or did get crisis intervention only for this to peter out to nothing after the initial emergency and they were left worse than before!

Such a letter could be signed as individuals or as members of this forum (being members of a group rather than individuals does give it more clout I have always found)

I have often thought of writing such a letter myself and will if no one else wants to join me – but it would have much more impact if many of our 300 odd members wrote to the PM and their MP at the same time – so who will join me?

Thank you for your words tinkabell as they have spurred me on to try other things. I am no nearer to getting a laocal management committee which would enable the forum to get grant and charity funding but there are more ways than one to skin a cat and if we could get enough support funding and with support for the issues and recognition of the value of a forum like ours we may be in a better position to get permanent funding later.

My motivation is not just funding for this forum alone but to get this issue on the agenda and to pass on the things we have learnt about PNI from running this forum and better funding etc for Mother and Baby Units specialists etc – a tall order but you have to start somewhere

Thanks and all the best

Veritee


PS if anyone takes leaflets into HV etc and wants to explin what PNI.ORG does - you are welcome to print out any of my posts or cut and paste section sof them to help explain.

[tinkabell]

i have already spoken to the manager of my local surestart who is happy to put up posters. Re; a letter to the pm yes i think we all should send and to our mp and think draft is very good idea. Also thought about writing to this morning ie. fern britton or chris steele as aware they have done items on PNI and fish oils. I also thought about breakfast tv and lorraine kelly but maybe someone would have to be seen dont know how you feel about this. Also thought about Anita Roddick i worked for bodyshop direct once and know they support local groups. Wellwoman also and what about mental health charities im full of ideas and understand it would be a mammoth task for you to take on and costs perhaps you could draft a specimen letter and different people could take on sending to agreed people. Also what about womans magazines, loose woman tv show, womans aid etc. Sorry if im rambling mind just working overtime.

[Mum2Jack]

Hi Veritee

I am in between feeds grumbled burps and poohs here so didnt manage to read all your posts, however....

I ran my own company up until last year and am capable of doing mail merges in Word from an Excel spreadsheet. We used to find our target audiences by purchasing data lists from Yell dot com. They are specific lists of names and addresses of people in the Yellow pages. They send you them in an ASCII text file which converts to Excel, and then can be put into a mail shot to get to exactly the decision makers you are after.

You can browse on Yell to see the different categories. Maybe you would refine the search to Healthcare professionals, universities and health Visitors. We paid about £100.00 for our listing but we were only targetting companies of a certain size so we got loads (at a 1.5% response rate to the marketing - rough guestimate) we did get about that in responses of people interested. I think it was 2p per record back then.

Anyway I am rambling. Given the printer cartridge costs, paper and stamps, its well worth doing. I can help to do this if you like, although it would have to be in January when little 'un in in Nursery. I drop to a 4 day working week and will need something to do on the 5th day.

Hope this makes sense.

Let me know what u think and whether you need my help.

LOL

Jiggles (Mum2Jack)