This weekend marks the real start of our Jimmy Fund Marathon Walk campaign.

Either Saturday or Sunday the Fall River Herald News will run a story in both their print and online editions about the Walk. The online story will be accompanied by a video of me talking about the Walk and asking people to join the team or make contributions.

Next week, Phil Devitt, who edits the Fall River Spirit , served as our publicity chair for Relay, and supervised our NET Awareness Day press package, and I will sit down to plan the full public relations plan for the rest of the Walk campaign and the Press Kit for this year’s Awareness Day. He will also do a story on the Walking with Jane Marathon Walk plans for the group of papers he works with.

Meanwhile, negotiations continue that may lead to a joint Caring For Carcinoid/Walking with Jane Marathon Walk team that would be good for both organizations. All we have to do now is convince Dana-Farber that it is a good idea. We would benefit from CFCF’s broader reach while they would benefit from our expertise in public relations and motivation techniques. Together we think the whole would be greater than the parts.

But I have to be honest: I am frustrated. Last year at this point I had personally already raised over $1250 for the Marathon Walk. Within minutes of posting the Walk online last year we had over $500 in pledges. This year we are just over $500 online with another $90 in checks set to be mailed to Dana-Farber once we have the documents in hand to do so. That leaves us down 50 percent from last year at this same point.

Views of the website have also been down significantly for the last two months–and have been trending downward since Christmas. Part of that may be because of my slowness in figuring out SEO–a thing I finally cracked the end of last week. And view numbers have improved significantly since I finished that operation on Monday morning. But some pieces–and I had two this week that did significantly better–generate far more reader interest than others. It will be a few weeks yet before I know whether this week has reversed the trend or not. My goal for the site in terms of views for the first 12 months still seems feasible: 12,000, roughly the number of new NET cases that will have been diagnosed over that period.

I remain optimistic. There is good science being done on NET every day. Every day there is a new paper or new finding to read about. Over the next few days you will begin to see more links appearing in the Resources section. With Relay over I should have more time to focus on keeping those sections more up to date. There are several new posts there today–though the majority are for the medical community rather than the rest of us. But one story in particular tugged at my heart. It is about a married couple. She was diagnosed with NET three years ago. He was just diagnosed recently.

One says now they can fade away together. It made me cry.