Campaign’s initial acts

We had a long meeting at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute yesterday afternoon about the next steps for 3-in-3:The Campaign to Cure NET Cancer. Walking with Jane will play a significant role in developing the initial social media side of things, while also providing support materials like pamphlets and pins.

There’s lots of work to do on this.

Initial response to our new NET Cancer pin has been good and we hope to make those more broadly available over the course of the next several weeks. Our new NET Cancer FAQ pamphlet goes to press shortly–and those, too, will be made more broadly available in the coming weeks.

Tying things together

January 5 is the launch date for next year’s Boston Marathon Jimmy Fund Walk. Money raised in that event by NET Cancer teams will count toward the Campaign’s financial goals, as will money raised by NET Cancer teams in the Pan Mass Challenge. I am going to try to get the captains of all those teams together to talk about ways we can help each other raise even more money through those events.

Walking with Jane will play a significant role…

We will encourage people to use #cureNETcancernow as a means to gather social media posts on the campaign and its activities in a single place on both Twitter and Facebook. Walking with Jane will launch the social media side of things with a series posts about what we are doing every day to cure NET cancer. We will also encourage others to do likewise.

Working for impact

Think about the impact we could all have if every researcher, every caregiver, every patient did just one thing every day to cure NET cancer. And many of us are doing that already. What we are not doing is sharing what we are doing every day. Think about the impact on awareness if we could make #cureNETcancernow a trending phrase for even one day on Twitter.

#cureNETcancernow

We will make the 3-in-3 Giving Page on the DFCI website dynamic by changing the copy there on a regular basis and by adding a feature where people can see the overall progress of the campaign in addition to what has been donated directly on that page, since events like the Walk and the Walking with Jane Fund Giving Page and other DFCI NET cancer oriented funds will count toward the campaign’s financial goals.

Building on the wave

We’ll begin working more diligently to find corporate sponsors as well as new individual donors after the new year. To that end, we are working on presentations of various kinds aimed at different kinds of groups. We already have two patients who are willing to talk about their experiences, in addition to me and the researchers at Dana-Farber.

Think about the impact…

I’ll also be working on a new series of 15-30-second videos for use as public service announcements in the coming months. That will start with updating some I did last year.

Once and future campaign planning

There’s lots of work to do on this. I hope many of you, especially those in the Northeast, will pitch in in any way you can. This is an opportunity to begin working on one of the goals I suggested last year–building a national awareness and support for NET cancer research by building on the regional cancer centers. In late December, I plan to revisit those ideas and see where we are on each of them.

…a new series of 15-30-second videos…

But that is a project for another day.

(Editor’s Note: Those of you who follow my posts here on a regular basis know this has been a busy and difficult few months for me. Between the five-year anniversaries of Jane’s last months and my work on this and other projects, I am mentally and physically exhausted.  One of my brothers arrives tonight from the West Coast. I’m taking the next week off to spend time with him and engage in a little rest and recreation. I’ll check in on social media and here periodically, I suspect–but I’m largely taking a vacation for the next week.)