This University of Kentucky campus tradition will take place online. Here’s how.
For many University of Kentucky students, last year’s 24-hour DanceBlue marathon was the last taste of normalcy before the curtain fell on pre-pandemic Lexington.
The marathon that saw over 900 dedicated, dancing UK students and their donors raise over $2 million for children’s cancer research ended on March 1, 2020 — just a few days before Kentucky’s first confirmed case of COVID-19.
The UK students behind this year’s marathon have had to plan how to move a campus tradition to a fully online format while also keeping the charity’s sole purpose in mind: Raising money for pediatric cancer research.
“Obviously, nobody expected any of this but also, kids with cancer and their families don’t expect to go through that,” said Morgan Thurza, a UK senior and DanceBlue’s programming chair.
After careful planning, this year’s dance marathon — slated for April 10 — will be fully virtual and shortened from 24 hours to 8 hours. Allie Holt, a UK senior and DanceBlue’s overall chair, said the biggest challenge in planning this year’s marathon was weighing whether to have an in-person component.
Students and many in the Lexington community look forward to the annual dance marathon at Memorial Coliseum, so various plans to have some sort of in-person component were widely considered. But ultimately, Holt said they didn’t want to do anything that compromised the charity’s sole purpose.
“We really had to look back to why DanceBlue is an organization in the first place and really base our decision off that and we didn’t want to have any possibility of having an event that could spread COVID-19 or anything like that,” Holt said.
The obstacles and benefits of fundraising in a pandemic
DanceBlue’s traditional fundraising avenues have been filled with obstacles this year, said Lizzie Rupp, the organization’s fundraising chair. But like many other organizations bogged down by the pandemic, Rupp said DanceBlue has found more success online.
“This year has provided us with a really interesting opportunity to kind of, in a good way, be forced to try something new and think outside of the box a little bit,” Rupp said.
Individual student dancers have to raise their own funds to dance in the event, and for dancers who have been doing the fundraiser for years it’s been challenging to meet their own personal goals. Many recurring dancers have recurring donors, Rupp said, and many of those donors have said they might not be able to donate this year or at least not to the same extent as in the past.
Additionally, larger annual fundraising events like DanceBlue’s 5K and silent auction had to go virtual, offering interested folks from across the country a chance to get involved.
“There was someone in California that ran our 5K, but it was virtual so he could, which was really cool,” Rupp said. “We had family members of committee members that really wanted to bid on auction items, but had never been able to in the past because they’re from out of state and they don’t live here.”
DanceBlue has long had an online donation portal, Rupp said, but it wasn’t until this year that they’d really worked hard at promoting it. Fundraising through the online platform at danceblue.networkforgood.com will be ongoing until 3:30 p.m. the day of the marathon, Rupp said.
How do you do a dance marathon on Zoom?
The marathon will begin at 11 a.m. and the first two hours will be spent learning the “line dance” that all of the dancers will do at least once an hour throughout the marathon. Participating dancers will join in from home either alone or with a “quaranteam” if others they live with are also dancing in the marathon.
In a normal year, every hour of the marathon is themed and come with their own games and activities. This year to keep engagement up, the theme will change every 30 minutes. The games and activities will be Zoom-friendly, with participants utilizing digital escape rooms or game-show-like activities, Thurza said.
At the end of the marathon, like in previous years, DanceBlue will reveal how much money was raised.
“It’s very much the same format as how we normally do it,” Thurza said. “Just adapted to, you know, virtual times.”
Expanding DanceBlue beyond Central Kentucky
Many within DanceBlue are very aware that had the 2020 marathon been scheduled for a week later, it likely would not have happened.
“A lot of dance marathons that happened the weekend after and beyond, they had to totally just shut it down, because they also didn’t have time to make a virtual component,” Holt said.
Holt said she’s hoping that the lessons learned while taking this year’s marathon virtual could get passed on to future students, especially those virtual fundraising components.
“So grandparents in Florida can still bid on an item if they want to, for example,” Holt said. Little things like that... I’m hoping that we are able to keep things like that up just so we can still expand the DanceBlue community beyond Central Kentucky.”