A few weeks back I put out THIS public call to all 9 of the mobile carriers serving Vancouver, challenging one of them to step up to the plate and help bring our @VIAwesome tweets into the present day by providing our organization with a new phone and a data plan.
I was passed a contact for that new company that just breezed into town and got in touch with their director of communications who told me to have a conversation with their ad agency in Toronto... but he wouldn't tell me how to get ahold of the person in charge of their account and he wouldn't respond to my e-mails when I asked him for a little more help. The conversation basically ended there and I must admit I was a bit discouraged but in a way relieved because we want to work with companies who truly get what we're doing and are as interested in working with us as we are with them. And then the phone rang. Literally. It was Evan Neufeld on the line, a guy whose name appears on our 2009 donor plaque, and he was wondering if anybody had come through for us yet with a phone. I told him that no, unfortunately, we hadn't heard from anybody in regards to the public call... and he got excited, which at first I thought was pretty weird. This is a guy who not only understands what we're doing here at V.I.A. but also months ago had personally helped by making a private donation during our donor drive... and little did I know but he is also a guy who works at TELUS!
Evan told me that TELUS would be more than happy to provide Vancouver Is Awesome with a fancy new Motorola Backflip phone and an unlimited data plan for the next year. A YEAR! If you already follow us on Twitter this isn't news to you as we've been talking about it on there and you've likely noticed that I've been using our new phone to bring you tweets from beyond the walls of my office. Tweets with photos even, and it's also helped me keep up on my seemingly never ending communications beyond Twitter because the phone also (obviously!) has e-mail capabilities on it.
So TELUS is undeniably our new hero and the future of our tweets will indeed be friendly!
Oh, and here's what our old phone looks like...
