I checked my tracking number for my Secret Santa. Attempted delivery on Friday 23rd Dec but nothing since 
.
I know my SS will love their gift when it finally gets to them!
Who likes updates? 
I figured a few stats could liven spirits while we endure the grueling wait of international shipping. Here’s where we are at:
People who have provided proof of shipping: 100%
People who have confirmed they’ve received their gift: 71.4%
People who have posted photos of their gift: 66.6%
It is our first year with complete participation. At the original requested ship-by date, we had 71.4% of packages shipped. Within a week of that date, we had 85.7% shipped. All packages were fulfilled within two weeks of the ship-by date except for two, both of which had excellent reasons and were negotiated and fulfilled as quickly as possible. As such, all new policies implemented this year can be considered successful to my knowledge.
Keep posting your gifts as you receive them! They are heart-warming, community-fostering, and loads of fun to see! All of our Secret Santas worked hard this year, as evidenced by the over 400 unique messages in my inbox concerning Secret Santa. Haha.
Keep up the great work, folks.
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Any update @funmonkey54? Hopefully nearing 100% on all these by now. Only a week left of January!
I’m traveling for a funeral today and tomorrow but I’ll run the exact info as soon as I get back.
Sorry for your loss mate.
Sent out a last call to people who have not posted images or contacted me about having received their gift. If you fall into that category, please respond to my PM. If you believe you fall into that category and have not received a PM from me, please message me immediately.
Going to ask everyone to give me a few extra days to get the final survey together and work on sorting out the last of the SS gift situations.
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400 years later…
Hi! My life fell apart for a little bit but I put it back together and you all were at the top of my “post-crisis” list. So here I am doing my best to tie up any loose ends. Please forgive me.
STATS:
People who have provided proof of shipping: 100%
People who have confirmed they’ve received their gift: 92.8%
People who have posted photos of their gift: 76.2%
As of now, we only have three unresolved cases. I am working with those people individually.
GIVEAWAY:
We realized shortly after starting this year’s event that the giveaway is incredibly flawed. What if a recipient is deployed? What if someone is away on business? What if someone falls il? We cannot force people to post photos of their gifts. Furthermore, people who worked hard on their gifts but had a recipient that did not post photos get punished unfairly. So we’re canning it. I’d rather eat crow than have an unfair element to SS. So we are restructuring. Anyone that takes the survey I’m sending out now and follows the instructions at the end will be entered into the giveaway and it will be done raffle style. This was the best compromise I could come up with. Taking the survey seriously shows your commitment to the secret santa process.
The survey will be open for seven days, closing at 11:59PM EST Wednesday, March 1st.
CLOSING NOTES:
First, let me say thank you to everyone for your patience throughout this entire process. It has been a lot of hard work but incredibly rewarding nonetheless. I tried a lot of things this year that haven’t been done before and I’ve taken a lot of data and notes related to the event to hopefully make next year better, smoother, and quicker on my end.
Second, if you have any significant issues that you feel the survey does not give you room to adequately address, PLEASE let me know. I respond ASAP to all PMs. If at any point I’ve missed your PM, send me another! I want to make sure you are heard.
Finally, this thread will end with the giveaway results. I want the photo thread to be left purely for sharing our gifts. Both will be closed after I give a little more time for anyone that decides to continue sharing.
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@funmonkey54 might want to check that end date my friend. It’s 2017, time flies right 
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You’re going to have to literally walk me through what you’re talking about. I reread my post four times and I can’t even find where I’ve referenced a year.
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Mate, your closing your poll on the “29th of Feb”.
2017 is not a leap year my friend.
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Makes much more sense.
I literally just added 7 to 22 and said “Thank God, it’s done. Submit.”
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75% of you have responded already to the survey. Thank you! I’m going to respond to a handful of the questions/comments that I didn’t consider and would like to clarify for the general audience.
- “If I say anything too negative in this I’ll problem get a PM.”
I have the survey set so that the last question is separate from the rest of the survey. You could completely trash the entire Secret Santa event and leave your name at the end and I wouldn’t know it was you. I did this on purpose. I want honest feedback and your name is NOT being attached to what you have to say. This is also why I opted for one big, general link.
- “Survey needs more questions.”
I have to pay if I want to include more than 10, so I boiled it down to what I thought was most pertinent and included more space for people to write out their thoughts where I couldn’t really get all I wanted from the questions.
- “I am upset that the person I sent to did not post photos.”
What I realized this year is that you truly cannot predict what will or will not influence someone’s ability to post photos. It is easy to take for granted the stability necessary to reliably post a photo. It seems so simple but we had members this year not post for VERY good reasons that simply aren’t appropriate to share. You’ll have to take my word for it but I promise I bugged everyone that didn’t post individually so far as I could without being offputting.
Thank you all for your great feedback! For those that did not include your name, I will simply take that as an opting out of the drawing. I appreciate every single bit of feedback including the negatives. And know that I will consider everything said, even if you find that it does not get implemented as you would have liked.
that is crazy you have to pay for extra question.
Well you did great with what you worked with.
Love you fam
Forgot to add this to my survey but maybe to offset the no picture shared, each member takes a picture before they send and if it ends up not being shared then at least we can see what the prezzies were?
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The problem with that is that people do not have the option of shipping gifts directly to their assignments upon purchase, which, from my notes, would have affected at least a quarter of our participants.
Random winners drawn below. If you fine collectors would send me a message with your shipping details, I’ll follow up from there.
1st Prize: @martincollects
2nd Prize: @quuador
3rd Prize: @areestee
I’ve also put all the survey data together into a single document. Thank you to everyone that helped with that. We should be able to roll this out in future years with a fraction of the back-end effort. I appreciate the patience everyone has given me as I’ve toiled with streamlining this process. It slowed things down a lot this year but I think you’ll really see it pay off in the future.
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Wow this was a very pleasant surprise haha!
Thanks and thank you for organizing everything so well!
Messaging you now