2026 was our BEST parade yet!!!

THANK YOU for your patience for these results! This parade season has been unlike any of our previous years. To be honest, I always worry a lot in the lead-up to any of our fundraisers. I get nervous, I lose sleep, hiccups inevitably happen and I have to let go of my idea of “perfect” and be satisfied with what can realistically get done…

This year I have not had nearly the amount of time I’ve had in past years to work on a parade float, partly due to a work contract that was wrapping up at precisely the same time, partly due to Brock being out of state for the majority of the summer (he has been stunt doubling on set of a big TV show in New York!), and partly due to a lot of unusually full schedules the past several weeks (including a scheduled in-patient stay at Children’s Hospital for an overnight EEG study). I spent a lot of time making a video presentation for a pharmaceutical company as well and all of the above left me with little time for building a parade float!

I was SO glad that I had already committed to freshening up the train that I began making last year rather than building something completely new! Phew, I would have been in real trouble if I hadn’t decided to make our train a long-lasting one!

Still, we were really down to the wire the morning of July 4^th when I, and my fearless friends who volunteered to help, decorated our train with streamers and flags and balloons and more as quickly as possible. I had accidentally left behind many of the decorations back at home so we just had to wing a lot of it and I’ll admit I was feeling a bit flustered and not as prepared as I wanted to feel when we had to begin moving to the start of the parade.

I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing stress and not letting disappointment (warranted or not) affect how I present myself outwardly. There was a parade that needed to be marched and we only get one go at it and I was determined to use that time to the fullest! And wouldn’t you know… it was our most successful parade ever. By far.

Our Best Parade EVER!

Brock is the “lucky” individual who gets to hear my inner monologue while I spiral through stress (he’s good at reminding me of reality when I need it) haha! I had told him how I was feeling at the start of the parade and I told him afterwards that I had just learned a lot of valuable lessons! Sure, maybe our cute red caboose wasn’t fiber-glassed and leaving a bunch of the décor at home meant our float wasn’t precisely what I had planned it to be. And no, I didn’t have time to take photos or videos or upload updates to Instagram stories before the parade started like I had planned. And maybe I should have prepped a little more the night before, but - BUT - there were quite a few things we did really really RIGHT!

• For starters, I registered for the parade a couple weeks earlier than I did last year and it put us in a MUCH more appealing spot on the parade line-up! Rather than being at the end of the parade (like the last two years) we were basically right in the middle, which meant we began marching nearly an hour sooner! Yes, it meant less time to decorate, but it was much cooler and all of us (most importantly Damian) seemed a lot more comfortable throughout the very long march through the city!

• Might seem small, but I put a wireless speaker in the train engine and created a long track of music with a fun repeating train whistle sound on top and it really made a big impact! I’d love to someday put a real whistle and bell into the train engine but in the meantime, the speaker helped a lot!

• I did not spend a single all-nighter working on the parade float. I spent time the morning of the parade wondering if I should have stayed up the night before to prep more, but I’m glad I didn’t. I’ve been working to try and make all of our fundraisers more sustainable and healthy for me, and ultimately, this parade proved that a fundraiser’s success is NOT dictated by my level of exhaustion!

• Rather than spending MORE time and energy (that I simply didn’t have), the BIG difference made this year actually stemmed from re-thinking the whole goal and potential impact of being in the parade at all:

Re-thinking the goal of the parade

In years past we have gotten a lot of attention from being the parade. Small town parades are often just a stream of clever ads, and my goal was to be a very memorable ad! We’ve never really gotten a “return,” so to speak, of donations as a result of being in the parade, but my goal was just to get our city familiar with our family's mission, and it certainly worked.

This year though, I wanted to see if there was more opportunity. Do I really just want people to know who we are and then hope that leads people to check out the website and hopefully gather that we are raising money and then hopefully decide on their own to donate? Do I really just hope people will be able to hear the parade announcers who speak throughout the parade route talk about us for a moment and then hope they’ll feel moved to donate and then hope they remember our website?  That’s a LOT of hoping…

The longer I campaign the more I learn again and again that if you want something, just ask for it. Just say what you want from someone. Be honest and specific. Then make that course of action really really simple for them to do – one or two steps at the most!

So I focused in: what did I want out of this parade??

• I wanted people to donate

• I wanted people to learn about our big Halloween and Christmas fundraisers

$1000 by the end of the parade!

Knowing that most people won’t hear the parade announcers over the loud speakers, and try as I might, most people would not receive a flyer and there was no guarantee they would read it even if they got it, meant that whatever message I was trying to send needed to be embedded into our float. So I tried something – what if we made a billboard with a goal to raise $1000 during the parade? And what if I put even more QR code signs all over the place that lead to SaveDamian.com where all 4 donation methods are immediately visible on a phone?

You guys. It worked.

We’ve never gotten more than a few people donating to the campaign during the actual parade. But this year I was overwhelmed!! At any given moment, someone was either asking for a flyer, asking me to pause our train for a second so they could scan the QR code, or literally coming up to me or one of our volunteers with cash to donate.

By the end of the parade, both my pockets were stuffed full and my phone said I’d received 64 Venmo notifications! What?!?!

You guys, people are SO GOOD!!!!!

Flyer calendars

Per my re-thinking-the-parade exercise, I re-designed our flyers to include information about our upcoming Halloween and Christmas fundraisers (including dates) and that turned out to be a great move too!! While I passed them out I would say loudly how this flyer had the dates of the fun fundraiser events throughout the year especially for young families and frequently someone would call out “Yes, we went to Halloween last year! It was so fun!” or they’d say “oh the dates are on there? Can I have one?” I think the value of this flyer went way up this year and I’m hopeful it may even have made it onto a few refrigerators!

THE RESULTS

Y’all. I love our community. I love it so much! After any fundraising event that we do, friends and volunteers who helped out with it always tell me how wonderful and heart-filling an experience it was to see the good of humanity in real time - and this parade was no different. People are so good and I am SO SO GRATEFUL.

When we got home a little before noon, I dumped all the cash donations onto the ground and began counting. I know I had made a goal of $1000... but of course you never know! We had never made a goal like this for the parade before! I really didn't know what to expect.

We received $417 in cash donations. I was STUNNED.

After counting the cash, I checked our Venmo – and I GASPED. Then our GoFundMe. And finally PayPal.

Here are the results:

The average donation amount was $27. AHHHHH. Oh my WORD you guys!!! If this doesn’t prove that many hands make light work!!!! UGH people are so SO GOOD!!!

I’m about to add all these donations manually to our GoFundMe so we can get our current overall fundraising count, but it doesn’t take much math to realize that we have now hit another mini milestone of $1.18 MILLION!!!! AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! WHAT A BLESSING!!!!!!

Wow. Wow wow wow. A lot of really valuable lessons learned in this parade season! I’m so so grateful for all of you. Thank you thank you thank you SO MUCH for your support and for helping me spread the word of our campaign.

Yesterday I had a check-in with the founder of the Wylder Nation Foundation (our campaign’s beneficiary) and hearing about the work that they have been able to do because of you gives me SO much hope and makes my heart so full. We are getting ever closer to treatment for Damian and I am SO SO GRATEFUL!!!

LET’S GO!!!!!!!

<3