Scott BresslerClick here to view a multimedia slideshow from Dance Marathon
Dance Marathon went off without a hitch last Saturday, with record-breaking attendance and money raised.
The Athletic Complex was teeming with 801 well-wishers on Nov. 3.
Registration for Dance Marathon 2007 broke records, with 1056 people registering to dance for 12 hours to fundraise for the Children’s Miracle Network.
With more people came more money: This year, Dance Marathon raised $162,275.02, all of which is “for the kids.”
Jim Hall, president and CEO of the Children’s Miracle Network, delivered the opening remarks of Dance Marathon.
“As that curtain raised, I got goosebumps because I knew we are going to break records tonight!” said Hall.
Hall’s predictions proved true, with attendance growing dramatically and raising roughly $40,000 more than the previous year’s total of $123,000.
Dance Marathon appeared in the news earlier this year, when the student organization was denied block funding by Student Union. However, they were granted more funding before appeals than last year, which allowed them to expand their activities and supplies for dancers this year.
Gregory Perlstein, the executive director of Dance Marathon, places the growth of Dance Marathon firmly on the commitment of everyone involved.
“I think that we continue to grow every year because each person who comes to the executive board brings new ideas and new vision for their part of the board,” said Perlstein. “That lets us collectively achieve new things.”
Much of the praise should also be given to publicity. Perlstein acknowledged that Dance Marathon had an increased presence on campus this year.
“We have always been good with visibility, but this year we wanted to be constantly accessible.”
The publicity for Dance Marathon was heavy this year.
On “pizza promotion day,” students were given free pizza and a chance to learn more about Dance Marathon and register. There were Dance Marathon stands during freshman registration, giving them a chance to sign up within their first day on campus. And there were date auctions and distributions of free T-shirts.
Dan Silver, Dance Marathon’s director of involvement, attributed much of this year’s success to word-of-mouth promotion among students.
“Word-of-mouth is huge, because people often don’t know what to expect, so they get their impressions of [Dance Marathon] from friends,” he explained. “We had great morale captains this year.”
He said that students even started Facebook groups for the event unprompted by Dance Marathon.
Online publicity for Dance Marathon might have even gone overboard, according to freshman Andrew Rosenbaum, who said that Dance Marathon rivaled the Hillel House in amounts of Facebook spam.
This year also saw wider publicity outside the scope of Washington University. Dance Marathon had ads on Movin’ 101.1 for 2 weeks, publicity in some St. Louis restaurants and was on KSDK, one of St. Louis’s TV news channels.
As a result, there were a number of participants who were not University students, but rather Fontbonne students, high school students and a number of faculty and staff members.
“I think [Dance Marathon] is just becoming more of a St. Louis tradition,” said Silver.