During the past few weeks my public relations group has been working on coming up with fun and unique ways to get people excited about Relay for Life. Our three proposed themes for Relay for Life are pirates, “Rockin’ Relay”, and super heroes. I am personally a big fan of the Rockin’ Relay, as I think that will have the widest appeal and will be the easiest to facilitate. Anyways, my group developed some great ideas for ways to get people excited about relay. For example, for the pirate theme, we have fundraisers like taking a photo with a real parrot. People could really get excited about something like that, and I think it would do really well. We also had fundraisers specific to the pirate theme such as selling pirate “grog” (something like sparkling lemonade or whatever) in a fun pirate-esque mug. To raise awareness, we can things like allow survivors to wear a pirate cap and feather at Relay and we could show Pirates of the Caribbean at the Opera House. For the super heroes theme, we have some more specific fundraisers. For example, we can get life-sized cut-outs that people can put their faces in and take photos with for a donation. Another fundraiser could be a Spiderman web-shooting (silly string) contest, and a giant q-tip fighting ring. At relay survivors could wear a cape. For the “Rockin’ Relay” theme, we could have Guitar Hero contests and we could rent a jukebox people could donate to play a song on. We could get actual musicians to play at Relay, and we could have a costume contest for the various eras of rock and roll. For every theme, we will make a Facebook page and do various other fundraisers like spaghetti dinners and bake sales. Relay for Life advertising is very different than Ad Council advertising like we see here. The Ad Council advertising is very military-inspired and uses raw emotion to gain attention for its "product". In that manner, Relay advertising is similar. The print and audio groups, for example, use cold-hard-facts about cancer to gain an emotional ploy over viewer/listeners. Much like how Rosie the Rivetor was used to empower women for the war efforts, Relay advertising is used to inspire individuals about how they can help make a difference in the world. Perhaps eventually the ACS will gain enough attention that Relay for Life will earn a PSA campaign from the Ad Council. Until then, we, the students, survivors and peers, will work hard to make Relay the best it can be. Our entire Comm class has given a great seed of ideas to our Relay Committee on campus, and our PR group worked hard to come up with some great ideas to raise both awareness and money. Here is to next year's Relay for Life!
