If a month without your Friday night Cosmopolitan sounds like a challenging task, then we’ve got the drink for you! You’ll now find two of the world’s most popular cocktails in convenient glass bottles at your local supermarket – and better yet – they’re 100% alcohol free!

Take them to a party during your HSM and people won’t even know you’re not drinking.

As our new drinks partner, look out for Soul on HSM’s Facebook page, where there will be drinks giveaways each month!

Head to the soft drink aisle of any Woolworths Supermarket for these indulgent refreshments

Find our more about Soul Virgin Drinks

HSM is excited to announce our newest partnership with the ‘one-stop shop for experience gifts’ – RedBalloon.

This offer is exclusive for those past and present HSMers looking to achieve some of their goals, whether it be conquering your fears of height by jumping out of a plane, or improving those photography or cooking skills.

RedBalloon is offering HSMers:

$20 OFF when you spend a minimum of $79 – Promo Code: HSM 989

Imagine feeling the adrenalin rush of a V8 race car, learning to sail or taking an exotic cooking class, RedBalloon offers these and  thousands more fun experiences across Australia.  To redeem your special offer visit redballoon.com.au, select your experience and enter the promotional code at the shopping cart to receive your discount.

Terms and Conditions

Offer Valid until 31st December 2012. Payment must be made via Credit Card, Paypal, Bpay, direct deposit or money order/cheque. All discounts arising from promotional offers and promotional codes are applied to transactions only after any RedBalloon Account credit or points are used and includes delivery fees. RedBalloon Terms and Conditions apply, for full details please see www.redballoon.com.au/help/terms-conditions.

Hello Sunday Morning is a world-wide movement towards a better drinking culture. Our purpose is to provide a free platform for individuals to create meaningful change in their lives through a 12 week period of sobriety. By sharing their story, each person’s stand is a unique and essential contribution to a better drinking culture. Our goal is to inspire 10,000 people to do a ‘HSM’ by 2013.

Our appeal is to find 2500 people to donate an average of $12 to keep HSM going until 2012.

We currently have over 2250 people using hellosundaymorning.com to create this change in their life. To ensure this service can continue in 2012, we are calling on our community to contribute to the HSM Holiday Hangover Appeal (dubbed #12in2012).

How you can get involved

1. Donate today or give a regular donation.

2. Share, tweet and facebook the #12in2012 link below with your friends, family and co-workers: https://www.givenow.com.au/hellosundaymorning

How the funds will be used

We need to find $30,000 to tie us over, operationally, until major project funding from government in January/February 2012.  

Are donations tax deductible?

Yes, Hello Sunday Morning is a registered charity with a tax donation status.  

Will I receive a receipt for my donation?

Yes, immediately sent to you by email when approved.

Hello Sunday Morning is a cultural change agent that continues to be community focused, our team invests over 600+ hours every month to curate, support and facilitate the HSM communinity. If you find value in what we do, invest in Hello Sunday Morning and make a donation towards improving Australia’s drinking culture.

We’re proud to bring you our latest batch of Hello Sunday Morning t-shirts available at our online merch and apparel store at http://hellosundaymorning.bigcartel.com/

Our tshirts are printed on quality shirt stock by Brisbane label Bambam. A big thank you also to Saltprint for hosting HSM at their photography and design studio and Pat Foley from Dremt Photography for her photographic expertise. We couldn’t have done it without you all!

To purchase the shirts head on over to our big cartel shop, payments can be made via either paypal or plastic. Be sure to measure yourself up against the sizing chart before making purchases. If you have any questions, email info@hellosundaymorning.com.au.

Welcome to the HSM community map.

Click on your state to join a Facebook group full of HSMers in your area. This will be a closed space for you to chat to HSMers like you.

(Apologies for NT HSMers – we’re in the process of setting up your group).

Enjoy.

HSM team x

Wtih undoubtedly tough competition across the country, we were very moved to be announced as the winners in this category. As finalists in this same category last year it was really rewarding to be receive the top honour this year.

Recognition such as this, really helps validate the work we’re aiming to achieve through our innovative program.

The awards were hosted by a collaboration of the following organisations:

• tednoffs – Foundation Empowering young people to overcome drug issues
• Alcohol and other Drugs Council of Australia (ADCA)
• Australian Drug Foundation (ADF)
• Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD)
• Australian Government: Department of Health and Ageing

Curious about Hello Sunday Morning?

So am I! (OMG! – TWINS!)

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be drip-feeding you some tasty discoveries from our endevours in understanding and explorations of all things HSM.

In August this year we will be releasing our full Research Report.
This will contain a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the ENTIRE HSM blog since its inception in 2009. Effectively, this report will be like climbing up a very, VERY high ladder and looking back down at HSM from a birds eye view.

What is the most common challenges facing HSMers?
How do HSMers support each other via the blog?
Assuming Dunbar is correct, what impact will 10,000 people doing HSM have in Australia? If we got to 1.5 Million people… what would happen then?
If you were to invest $1 in HSM… what change would that make in

These are just some of the questions we’ve been pondering in preparation for this report.

We aim to highlight the journeys that bloggers take in their HSM and what impact this has in their lives post-HSM. We will also draw together research depicting the effect HSM has on an individuals motivations to drink, mental health and overall quality of life.

But to start with we thought we might throw down some very exciting new discoveries from our semester long partnership with research students at the University of Sydney.

So first things first – a big round of applause to Catherine Walczak, Donna Kelly, Chang Sun, Poonam Shah and Jillian Los. They have been an amazing asset to our team this year.  Recently, they handed over a 251-page report (that’s not a typo… its HUGE), this has made a significant contribution to the body of knowledge supporting Hello Sunday Morning and the social impact we have made in Australia.

We now have a model…

What does this mean?

This model is effectively our new ‘roadmap’ for HSM… Where would you put yourself on this wheel?

What is important to understand about this model is that it includes the EXTERNAL factors of HSM. Not everyone we talk to is actually doing HSM themselves. Some people are thinking about it, others are simply not interested – and that’s totally fine. It is important for us to know where everyone sits on this model so we can support them in a way which is appropriate for their position.

For those who ARE doing HSM, this model also explains (in the blue list on the right) a few of the types of experiences within a HSM that people often encounter. NOTE: This was painstakingly MANUALLY deduced by the student research team at University of Sydney. They read over 160 bloggers entries on the HSM site in order to put this model together – AMAZING.

What is MOST important about this model that it explains how we deal with ‘failure’. We have always believed that  ’failing’ a HSM or drinking before the end of your HSM is not a dealbreaker. It’s part of life. This is not a dictatorship – its a social experiment. If you slip-up that’s AOK – just get back on the horse and keep going until you’re ready.

What we aim to do in the coming months, is work with the team here at HSM on structuring this model into the core functionality of the HSM website. You will soon be able to navigate through the site and find information / blogs / bloggers that are relevant to you.

Whether that is a story on how to cope when going to birthday parties sober, or why you might want to do a HSM at all… you will soon be able to navigate using this model as a guide.

So….

Stay tuned for more. It’s an exciting time!

Seeing Michael Franti perform at Bluesfest ’09 was a large part of the inspiration for my decision to build Hello Sunday Morning into what it is becoming today. Here is an interview we did with Michael at Bluesfes ’11, two years later. We wanted to find out what it is that inspires him. Thanks to Matt Roberts from Projucer for filming and getting it edited!

First of all if you haven’t already head over to the myinfo section and change your profile photo! Display photos are live and running and we’d love to see the community that much more personalised!

We’ve also updated the home page so you can now dynamically view the latest 27 HSM Blog posts via a ‘next and prev’ button. Check out the screen shot below and have a play.

The create new post change is now easier to use as well. We’ve added a ‘save draft’ function so you can save your posts and come back to them later in addition to making improvements in the overal look and feel of how you post. The post box is also twice as big and mirrors the formatting that you’ll see when you publish your post. Here is a brief explanation of the what post statuses do:

Draft: creates a draft post available for additional edits in your view blogposts section

Private: lets you privately publish a post, this makes the post visible to only you.

Publish: publicly publishes the post so everyone can see, share and comment on what you’ve written.

You can find the post status selections at the bottom of the post box, check out the screen shot below:

That’s all from us for this weekend. Next up is dynamic editing of profiles and subtle fixes here and there to make HSM online more intuitive to use. Hope you’ve had an awesome weekend, and as always for any feedback let us know in the comments section below or by email steve@hellosundaymorning.com.au.

Since taking the site live in early March we’ve been hard at work making ongoing improvements to ensure that the HSM online experience is both awesome and supportive of your HSM journey. The last few weeks have seen radical changes and progress in moving HSM online forward, and we feel it’s about time we open the flood gates on the work we’ve been doing. In the coming posts we plan to periodically update you with the latest on HSM Online as well as pitch ideas and concepts to grow the HSM community.

Before I continue with this week’s update I’d like to introduce myself and James as the team behind HSM Online. My name is Steve, and my background is in advertising and design but I’ve transitioned into the social innovation space, specialising in user experience and design thinking. I started with HSM in early 2011 when the HSM Web v2 was in it’s infancy and recently brought James on board as an inhouse web developer.  James’ background is in online and interactive development and has a knack for database supremacy, something that has been invaluable since the roll out of the v2 site. We’ve known each other since college and are nerds at heart, but love what we’re doing. Here’s a photo of us hard at work in the office from the Fourth of May:

James has the blue lightsabre and I’ve the red with lightning. Don’t let the casual boardroom poses fool you, our discussions are often of universal importance!

Before I get started on the updates I thought a brief history of HSM web would bring you up to speed. The first version of HSM ran as an editorial style blog with multiple users and was originally used by Chris. The original site, although great as a blogging platform was not built to handle the growing influx of participants and signups we were having and therefore a new site was needed. A beta site was designed and developed however after beta testing and site evaluation it became apparent  that more work needed to be done to fully support HSMers. To fastrack progress we opted for an internal approach which leads us to where we are today.

The site at the moment is close to fully functional. As of today one of our biggest achievements and one that we’re proud to present is the implementation of a new Signup process that more accurately reflects our HSM Community. It’s a big win for us, and we’re excited to have launched it in conjunction with the launch of HSM in Newcastle Uni.

In addition to this we’ve successfully merged and transferred the previously huge database of posts and users, made improvemetns to visual aesthetics and consistency of the site, optimised code, and provided a better user experience overall.

We’re still working on adding more features and improving the existing functionality of the site so keep a keen eye out. Over the next coming weeks we’ll be improving the way you create posts, edit your profile, and interact with the HSM Team – but we’ll fill you in as we go For interest sake here’s my project mindmap:

Just to give you an idea of what’s on our plate, everything in blue is a HSM project and most have their own seperate mindmaps exploring the projects further.

In the mean time if you have any questions, or want to provide further feedback feel free to do so in the comments section below or email me directly at steve@hellosundaymorning.com.au.

My final thought is, what improvements could help grow the HSM online community?