Sometimes life intervenes

My last post here was more than a month ago. I said then I hoped to post more often for the rest of the summer. Unfortunately, life intervened in the form of three deaths in four weeks, a sinkhole in the yard that attempted to swallow me whole, the second Walking with Jane direct mail campaign of the year, some landscaping issues, and doubts that what I am doing here and elsewhere against NET cancer is making a substantial difference.

…the news from Dana-Farber and elsewhere has improved in recent months.

But more difficult than any of that is what I have now accepted as the reality of August. This is the month Jane and I took our last vacation together, the month she had the biopsy on the tumors in her liver, the month we received the diagnosis that has defined everything since, the month of her first hospital stay, the month they told us we needed to go to Boston…

Walking with Jane year started fast…

Every little bump beyond the downer those anniversaries are further complicates my life–and there have been lots of those over the last four months. I have a dream for Walking with Jane–a dream based in what I thought was a realistic plan and a huge need. For the first two years we exceeded my expectations–we beat every goal I set–and beat them easily.

…we will do a live Web/Social Mediathon for NET Cancer Day on November 10.

And the first three months of this year started off well enough. By March 31 we had already generated over $6000. During that same period the previous year we had raised virtually nothing. We were two weeks away from a Comedy Night I was convinced would be huge. It made $700. The house was virtually empty.

Second quarter short of hopes

The Pasta Supper–a repeat of the previous year’s second biggest success–I expected would grow, but it shrank instead. We barely reached the previous year’s numbers because another group agreed to match what we raised up to $500.

…this website has fallen on hard times as well.

We attracted more exhibitors for our second annual Craft and Yard Sale but fewer customers. That hit everyone’s bottom line–including ours. My second $24-in-24 Hours event drew a third less money than it did the year before.

Walking with Jane Relay team up marginally

I personally visited over 300 businesses looking for sponsors for Relay for Life. Five of them actually made donations. That $1000 was the difference between what we raised a year ago and what we raised this year.

My goal this year is to generate $150-200,000.

That was a far cry from the goal–which was to double what we had pledged to raise the year before–before the rains came.

Marathon team behind last year

My work on the Marathon Walk has–for me–been similarly disappointing. While I have already raised about $1,300 more than I raised all of last year to this point, our team is significantly smaller than in 2012. And only one Walker besides me is back from last year. Part of that is because of the death from NET cancer of the father of two members of last year’s team who had recruited a number of friends to walk with them. His death in early June put an end to their plans to walk this year, but a number of people have made donations to the Walking with Jane Fund at Dana-Farber in his memory.

…our team is significantly smaller than in 2012.

But a number of other people who walked last year have decided not to walk this year as well. I only hope similar catastrophes have not hit them as well.

In any event, we will be hard-pressed to match last year’s Marathon Walk numbers this year–let alone double them as I had hoped–and expected.

Walking with Jane on the road ahead

Last year, by December 31 we had generated just over $100,000 for cancer research, two-thirds of which went into NET cancer research. Part of that came about because of a one-time two-for-one matching grant that will not be repeated this year that turned $10,000 into $30,000. My goal this year is to generate $150-200,000.

…we will be hard-pressed to match last year’s Marathon Walk numbers…

So far this year we have directly generated just over $35,000. I have trouble imagining where more than $30–35,000 more will come from in the next three-and-a-third months. This is not to say I am giving up–far from it. But matching last year is going to be a struggle–let alone getting to the $150,000 Year Three goal. I have a couple ideas I am working on that might pull that fat out of the fire.

Getting the Walking with Jane word out

Equally disappointing, however, have been our efforts to get the word out about NET cancer. Last week, I received a note from a 26-year-old in the SouthCoast area that includes Fall River and New Bedford. She has NET cancer and has been symptomatic for eight years. It was only this spring she got the right diagnosis–and she had to go to Tennessee to get it. This despite the newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and other media work we have done locally to get the word out to both doctors and potential patients.

I personally visited over 300 businesses looking for sponsors for Relay…

And this website has fallen on hard times as well. A year ago, we were closing in on 12,000 views. Today, we are just over 18,000 total. in our second year we have had barely half as many views as we did in our first.

Updating Walking with Jane site

One of the things we are working on is updating the site–which was state of the art when we launched it. We hope to make the site more visual and include video links to a YouTube channel. I am thinking about regular podcasts, as well, though what their content would look like I am not certain of yet.

My second $24-in-24 Hours event drew a third less money…

I do know we will do a live Web/Social Mediathon for NET Cancer Day on November 10. I will start working on the details of that about a week after the Marathon Walk. I want it to be more audio-visual than the one we did for $24-in-24-Hours back in April.

 NET cancer research making real progress

But while things have not gone as well as I would like here, the news from Dana-Farber and elsewhere has improved in recent months. DFCI closed on a $525,000 donation last month to fund NET cancer research, someone stepped up to fund the entire Phase I trial of the Uppsala virus, and there is some interesting new research being done in the US elsewhere that shows significant promise.

…the month we received the diagnosis that has defined everything since…

Where there is light, there is hope, as my mother used to say.