Royoballa

BartHumphries:

I believe the "congrats" email is the one you get for signing up for the Sears reward points program, the first part of two. The second should be an email that says "Billion Points" somewhere in the title, with a link in the center of the email to click to confirm the vote. It might have gone to your spam folder, although mine showed right up.

Thanks for trying!

I was notified of this contest by a den leader from the Kansas City area, and hoped to pass it along to as many BSA families and supporters as possible.

Sears is currently putting on a video contest called the "Billion Points Contest." In a nutshell it works like this:

Someone creates a video, chooses two charities to split the "points" with, and the public votes for the winner. It's down to the top 20, and only one of the finalists have chosen the Boy Scouts of America as one of their two charities with which they will split the points. Their other charity is the March of Dimes, another very family values oriented group.

From the Sears site:

The Grand Prize will be 547,740,000 points. Thats $547,740 in merchandise -- $273,870 for you, and $273,870 for charity. The prize pool started at 100,000,000 Points, and for every video uploaded, 10,000 Points were added to the prize pool. Since 44,774 videos were entered, the final prize amount came to 547,740,000 points. There will be one Grand Prize Winner from the 20 Finalists. The remaining 19 Finalists will each receive one million Points (a $1,000 value).

This would mean that the BSA would receive a donation of $136,935 if the video "A+ Movie Film 4 Make Benefit Charity" receives the most votes.

How can you help?

First, Sears is only counting votes for those who are enrolled in the "Shop Your Way" rewards program. This is tied to your email address, so you will first need to visit the following url and register a "Shop Your Way" rewards account:

https://www.shopyourwayrewards.com/cp/login_all.aspx

Once it is registered, visit the Billion Points Contest page here:

https://sears.promo.eprize.com/billion/gallery

Find the video called "A+ Movie Film 4 Make Benefit Charity" and click Vote. It will make you sign up again. Use the same email address you used for the Shop Your Way rewards account, or the vote won't count. It will send you an email with a link allowing you to vote once a day. After you've registered and voted once, the next day (24 hours later) you can just open the email, click the link and it will register a vote.

Currently the video that supports the BSA is only 50 votes behind the leader. There's a site tracking the votes here that updates every 3 hours:

http://home.lightsinwhitesatin.com:8899/~nick/scoreboard.xml

I think this is a great opportunity for the BSA, and I hope you will all help and pass this on to your scout friends as well. As was said, the sport in Scouting is to find the good in everyone and develop it. It's nice to see that someone has chosen to do good for the BSA.

New here, former BSA, hope to help gain more support for local Boy Scouts.