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Alumni Relations |
Alumni Fuel RU Green in Ford Challenge The Ford Motor Company has told the world that the Ford Fusion is up to and up for any challenge. To prove its claim, Ford has chosen eight Fusion drivers and their friends to put the Fusion to the test in unique ways. Todd Joyce MBA ‘99, an enthusiastic Ford Fusion owner, RU employee and alumnus, has enlisted four of his colleagues in the Information Technology Department to accept Ford’s challenge and is having quite a time doing so. On November 21, Joyce and Billy Kantsios ’97 flew to Detroit and picked up a new Ford Fusion SEL that is theirs to use for a three-week period. During that time, their team, RU Green, will answer a challenge every 41 hours and attempt to rack up the most points by completing activities with their 2010 Fusion.
With about half the contest period elapsed, RU Green is currently in second place. Using the same ingenuity and determination that they bring to growing and maintaining RU’s network infrastructure, Joyce’s crack team has already proven that they and their Fusion can deliver more than 2,200 pounds of frozen turkey to the Second Harvest Food Bank in Salem. “We do a lot of thinking, planning for doing things better daily at work,” said Davis, “so this has been a fun way to apply those same problem-solving skills.” The contest requires that the teams produce a video to document their response to the various challenges and upload them to the contest website at www.fusion41.com where their competitors and the world watch the teams put their Fusions through the rather unique paces. RU Green also has a dedicated Facebook page. In answer to the challenge to produce a video which shows as many people as possible dancing around their Fusion, Joyce and RU Green enlisted Joyce’s brother Brian, ’99, MFA’01, the assistant band director at Martinsville Middle School, to shoot a video of their Fusion during a recent Martinsville High School Band parade practice. The team also has scoured the campus and community for refrigerator magnets and uploaded a video of them removing more than 350 magnets from their car in less than two minutes. According to Joyce, their car’s paint job was unscathed, but Davis, the project leader for the magnets, was a “stress mess” as he tried to come up with swift and unique ways to strip the magnets from the car’s body in the time allotted. Another challenge featured Joyce delivering Alley as a mannequin dressed in as many used clothes as possible to a nearby clothing bank. The contest is a form of “person-to-person” marketing by which Ford highlights real people enjoying their Fusions and the contest is being run for Ford by Action Marketing Group in Boulder, Colo. “It has been a blast,” said Joyce. “We all can be pretty obsessive and the team is holding up well, but it is our families about whom we are worried.” |
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At stake for the winning team is the complete pay-off of the Team Leader’s personal Ford Fusion and a year’s worth of gasoline for the other team members. As team leader and owner of a 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid, Joyce stands to win big as do teammates Kantsios, R.J. Davis, Will Wirt and Travis Alley.