Saturday, March 3, 2012

Dance Marathon!

It's Dance Marathon time! For those of you that don't know, this is a Northwestern tradition, in which students dance for 30 hours straight raising money for child cancer research. While I'm not a dancer this year, I did help out earlier today at the kid's fair.

When I first heard about DM I got a little bit of the wrong impression about it. I thought that people pledged to donate for every hour that you danced (ie, $5 for every hour danced). That's the way most marathon fundraisers I know work.

This is why I was confused when I heard about the deadline to get half the donation money in, then later the deadline to get the donated money in. I knew people were having bake sales and parties where the money went to DM, but I'd thought that meant it was being raised in addition to the money they raised through dancing.

It turns out that when you sign up for DM, you have to collect $400 minimum (that's per group/entrant not per person) and then you dance at the end. While this is clearly a system that's been working here for a long time, I still think that if you're going to make a group of people do something for a long stretch of time they should be rewarded for each increment of time. That sentence is weird.

Anyway, good luck to all the DMers. By the time you read this DM will be over since I doubt you'll be reading this while dancing. Only 6 more hours!

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