I'd never heard of THON until I came to Penn State. While that doesn't exactly set me apart from a huge amount of people, right now I just really have no idea what THON is. People have tried to explain it to me, but those explanations always end up with, "You have to see it."
I'm in Press Row at the BJC looking on, still not really too sure what I'm watching. Right now the dancers are coming through the tunnel of people onto the floor, and I can only imagine what it must feel like to have such a huge array of people cheering you on, and cheering on the cause.
I wonder if Andrea Miller knows what she's getting herself into.
Only a few weeks after Pat Howley pledged to donate $1 for every follower that @AbolishCancer got on January 29th to THON, Miss Miller is choosing to do the same. Pat Howley (a junior at Penn State) wound up with a $1700 pledge to back up after the THON twitter account exploded with popularity. An outpouring of support from students, alumni, even IFC/PHC resulted in Pat's pledge ballooning to over $6000 being donated to the philanthropy.
Today's the day to help THON by way of Andrea Miller. For every follower that @AbolishCancer gets today, Miss Miller has pledged to donate $1. According to Abolish Cancer's website, Miss Miller is a recent Penn State grad who decided to participate in the pledge program because she feels that "no child should ever have to experience cancer." Miss Miller has pledged to sponsor up to 200 followers, but here's to hoping that she's able to receive a few matching donations, a la Mr. Howley.
THON weekend is quickly approaching, and as such the final list of 2010 dancers has been compiled. It is pretty interesting to take a look at the entire list. It definitely gives you a little perspective on where all these dancers are coming from.
As one could expect, the list is largely comprised of the Greek community, but the significant presence of independent dancers and independent organizations caught my eye as well. As to not offend the commonwealth campuses, there is quite a sizable non-UP representation as well, though that has been true of past years. Looks like a really good bunch! I'm looking forward to THON.
Check out the list, and give me your impressions.
Anybody who has a Twitter account probably knows about the big day that the THON Public Relations committee had on Friday. For the unenlightened, THON PR has been tweeting celebrities for the past few weeks asking them to help get the word out about THON. Their hard work paid off on Friday when Khloe Kardashian, of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, first tweeted about THON. She then promised to tweet back anybody who donated to the philanthropy. Jay Sean and Lindsay Lohan also helped out the cause be retweeting Kardashian's comments. Not surprisingly, this had a huge impact on the number of followers THON had on Twitter as well as hits on THON.org.
I was able to get a hold of Elyse Adams, PR Overall, who gave me some information about how Khloe helped out THON. "It's extremely exciting to have the support of someone like Khloe. She is helping us spread awareness about THON and pediatric cancer," Adams wrote in an email. She elaborated by saying that, "on Friday, January 29th, @THON gained 1001 followers on Twitter between the hours of 1:29 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. (plus a few hundred more on Saturday)! Our makeshift video to thank Khloe received more than 6,000 hits in one day. And our YouTube channel received more than 5,000 hits."
Read on after the jump for some more statistics from the day.
