Minds Eye Wins
2007 Public Awareness Award

Minds Eye Information Service received the 2007 Public Awareness Award from the International Association of Audio Information Services (IAAIS) at the recent IAAIS Annual Conference. This award recognizes the exceptional media coverage obtained and community awareness initiatives implemented during the 2007 Inaugural Beepball Tournament.

During the spring of 2007, the Minds Eye Information Service Inaugural Beepball Tournament was featured on all television news stations in the St. Louis metro area, in West News Magazine, and twice in columns written by Wally Spiers of the Belleville News Democrat. Many new friends and supporters were introduced to Minds Eye as a result of creative and targeted tournament publicity.

Beepball is blind softball. Both the batter and fielders are blindfolded, guided through the game by two sighted spotters and a sighted pitchers and catchers. Beepball is a game that everyone must see to believe. The second year of the tournament has just wrapped up and all proceeds from the Minds Eye Beepball Tournament presented by Allsup, Inc. directly support Minds Eye Information Service.

The IAAIS is an association of independently operated, volunteer-driven services that use audio technology to turn print into speech, bringing the words alive. IAAIS encourages the establishment and preservation of audio information/ radio reading services as a cost-effective means of providing people with date-sensitive information and programming developed to enrich the lives of consumers.

Summer is one of my favorite times of the year. The grass is growing (though I hope that yours isn’t either scorched or drowned or both like mine), the trees and flowers are in full bloom and the vegetables are just about ready to eat.

Summer is also a great time for getting together with your friends, family and others in the community. Family reunions, block parties, charity BBQs, church picnics, and local fairs and festivals really make the summer for me. There are the events that I go to every year - I count on the fairs for my annual fried Snickers bar fix and love going to the festivals to learn just a little more about the world we live in. Then there are those events that I stumble across for the first time and fall in love with.

How do we find those new events or find out when and where our favorites will be?

Usually it’s visual - we see announcements, ads and flyers for all of these things, and we want to go and be a part of them. Personally, I find out about most of the events I go to in the Get Out section of the Post Dispatch or sometimes in St. Louis Magazine. The 11,000 listeners of Minds Eye cannot pick up these publications and read all about what’s happening in our busy Metro area. Thank goodness for our volunteers and donors who help make the station possible, because Minds Eye is the only place our listeners can get information like this on their own.

One of the things that I’m proud of is that Minds Eye provides information about community events to our listeners. In fact, 65% of our listeners who are not homebound said that they heard something on Minds Eye that prompted them to go to an event or to somewhere new. That information gives our listeners a chance to get out and interact with people in the community, learn a little something about our world and yes, even eat a fried Snickers bar.

mindsEye...bringing printed words to life