Wii Play for a Cause
So much for the lazy days of summer. This one has been a busy one for the cause and event marketing team at BMC. We had our annual Gala in June, followed by our first Retail Therapy event the following weekend. July and August each had major golf tournaments. The result: we raised over $2 million this summer.
Another program we launched this summer was a partnership with a local sports bar and Boston's own Weekly Dig to host a Nintendo Wii fundraiser. The program was developed by Holt Murray on my team. You can learn more about it by watching this short video.
Looking ahead to the fall we have some great programs to launch.
Halloween Town. The new web site should be live today or tomorrow so check it out. This will be our third year hosting Halloween Town and we have some ambitious goals that I'll be posting on in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out our sponsors at the bottom of the homepage.
Healthy Promise Fund. This is the new national cause marketing initiative we hope to roll out with other public hospitals across the country. It's like the coalition for Children's Hospitals, Children's Miracle Network, but ours is for safety-net hospitals. Incidentally, the new cause marketing network on the block is the Cancer Research Alliance, a coalition of cancer hospitals that includes Boston's own Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. We're in the final stages of a logo and tag so I'll have something to share with you soon.
Boston Marathon. Like all the other charities that got Boston Marathon waivers last year, we raised a lot of money. Our challenge this year is that we've completed our three-year rotation and won't be getting anymore numbers, at least not from the BAA. This actually isn't the worse thing. Thanks to our own resourcefulness, we'll "find" 40 or 50 waivers for the marathon. The bigger challenge will be recruiting runners without exposure on the BAA web site. We use to get tons of calls from runners looking to run for charity--and all because they saw the hospital listed on the Boston Marathon web site. This year, we'll have to launch our own marketing effort to recruit runners for Team BMC. That effort will kick-in this month so stay tuned for more details.
