3 Weeks in and We're Making Real Progress

The Easter bunny is packing his pouch and searching for a good place to hide the Easter eggs around the house, and for those of us who may not prioritise chocolate at Easter, the long weekend is just a day away.   From our point of view, it couldn’t come quick enough. The last few weeks have been pretty hectic here at ThinkIrish.ie and a bit of R&R wouldn’t go astray. Three weeks in and the campaign is starting to slowly gain real momentum. We’ve just welcomed our 1,400^th supporter, which roughly equates to the creation of 21 new Irish jobs in the Irish economy.  It’s a figure that you can be proud of. 

Remember, 1 new job= 1 new mortgage,  1 less social welfare payment and  a much more comfortable existence for one more Irish family this Easter.

Wouldn’t it be great if every campaign member encouraged just one more friend to join us over the Easter holiday?  If they did, we could eliminate another dole queue just like the one in the picture.

    We’ve had lots of great ideas from campaign members as to how we might improve our Facebook pages, so we’ve listened carefully and will be making changes in the next couple of weeks.  You can expect to see a new Take Action Page, video links and an issues page, so keep an eye out for those.  April is also our competition month.  We’ll be launching a couple of really great competitions giving you lots of chances to win some terrific Irish products.    If you’re an avid competitor keep your eyes peeled to the website and FaceBook page and Twitter for more info.   Alternatively, if you’re a producer and want to get some free publicity for your product drop us a line @ hello@thinkirish.ie  and we’ll run a competition involving your product.

  What most excites us though this month is that our “guerrilla” tagging project is getting underway. This will involve some of our trusted and enthusiastic ThinkIrish.ie campaign volunteers going into various shops and supermarkets and personally tagging all the products that they can find on the shelves that we have in our directory with our special stickers (see opposite), don’t worry we’ll film it for all to see.  We think that this is a bit more fun and engaging than just having them printed on the product in a factory.  It’s also a great excuse to get out of the house/office for an hour or two...... provided that it’s not snowing on the day!  If you’d like to take part in any of our tagging activity, just pop an email to hello@thinkirish.ie                                                                            

 Our YouTube page has also been set up and our first video posted, it’s just a brief introduction to who we are at ThinkIrish and what our motives behind the campaign are.  Have a look at it below. Big thanks to Darragh and Stephanie for shooting, presenting and editing it.  Much appreciated.  Last but not least is our car sticker campaign, which is really gathering pace.  Thanks to Fergal, they’re available door to door in Ranelagh, if you’re one of the lucky ones, in Cork at Unislim classes and in Nash 19 restaurant and food shop, thanks to Shirley and Mary, from Flavours on Patrick Street in Dun Laoghaire and from the builders providers in Tuam, thanks John Paul. If you feel you can help with distribution or just offer us a space on your counter-top to make them available to customers – please email us at hello@thinkirish.ie

  So, that’s us for the week, if you haven’t bought your Easter egg yet, Flake and Time Out are always a good bet or if you want to splash out Lily O’Brien’s is a great treat and Irish too and don’t forget the numerous artisan chocolate producers out there – see the directory on ThinkIrish.ie for more information 

Happy Easter and have a great weekend.

Our Introduction Video

So, bed early tonight!

At last!  Summertime lands with us this weekend and the clocks "spring" forward at 1am on Sunday.  Best get to bed early tonight then to compensate!
Well, we had another hectic week at ThinkIrish.ie.  Things got off to a great start with our feature on the Derek Mooney show on Monday.  We loved our trip in to Montrose but despite having our autograph books to hand and keeping an eagle eye out for anyone remotely famous - the only celeb we got to meet was Derek himself.  Nice chap too.  Thankfully, we managed to avoid inadvertently flicking any of the gazillions of flashing lights that make the studio feel like the cockpit of a 747 'tho we did send some serious feedback through Derek's headphones by leaving a mobile on!  We took some footage of our visit so if we can just manage to get our newly arrived Sony "Bloggie" to export the video file, we'll post it online.  One thing we do want to do is to get someone to do a Video Blog for us of the Voya Seaweed Baths up in Sligo. If you're game (maybe you could bring a pal along for company and courage!), drop us a line at hello@thinkirish.ie, let us know why you should be the one to do it and we'll see if Mark Walton will help us get that organised.
Monday also saw the arrival of Cork Crystal into the ThinkIrish.ie directory - welcome onboard folks.  Their beautiful pieces are 33% lead and all mouth-blown and cut by hand on a diamond wheel - just when we thought you couldn't get real hand-made Irish crystal anymore!
One other company that caught our attention this week was Fieldstown Farm (you'll get them online at www.irishfood.ie).  They'll deliver lamb straight to your door and with Easter Sunday just around the corner that's sounding like a pretty good idea.  They also do a range of free range turkey and some beef products too.
Car Sticker distribution is starting to take-off and we're hugely grateful to the campaign supporters who've undertaken to help us.  So far, we've extended the distribution network to include Rathgar, Cork, Tuam and Arklow. If you think you can help in your area - especially if you have access to a large company or other suitable channel - please drop us a line at hello@thinkirish.ie.  

Next week we start work on a new competition for us all on Facebook (1,150 fans and growing by the hour. This is fast becoming a real people power campaign!).  We've got some great ideas that we want to get off the ground so watch this space.
Have a great weekend.

A good drink thoroughly spoiled!

So, just a little over a week since we launched and things are really starting to gather pace.  We've welcomed a whole bunch of new companies to the directory, including Powersource Surf Boards and the fruity people down on the Karmine Apple Farm in Tipperary who produce buckets of mouthwatering fruit juices.  Funnily enough, they also produce a Cider Vinegar which sounds like a good drink thoroughly spoiled if you ask us!  Anyways, we've put the call out for a sample crate of their finest sparkling apple juice - and if it lands with us we might just offer it as a prize for the growing number of ThinkIrish.ie fans on Facebook.

We just ordered a couple of those HD "flip" cameras and as soon as they land with us we're going to ship them out to people so you can capture the activity "on-the-ground" so to speak and share your product discoveries with us.  If you fancy having a go, pop us an email at hello@thinkirish.ie. 
Our "to-do" list is growing by the day.  We've got to find someone to help us distribute our car stickers nation-wide (thanks to Shirley in Unislim Cork for offering to help with our Munster roll-out!) and we've got great plans for a consumer "tagging" campaign where we get a crew of volunteers to blitz a retail outlet with ThinkIrish.ie stickers on all the relevant products.  Busy, busy.
Good news ahead of the weekend  is that D'Arcy's cleared to start against Scotland tomorrow - can't believe that after four years in Croker this will be the last Rugby match played there - so fingers crossed for the triple crown to mark the end of an era!