Park Cities 4th of July Festival

Hi Everyone!

We have an exciting opportunity and need your help! Randell Holmes and his wife Lori have encouraged us to have a presence at the Park Cities 4th of July festival. It involves a float (truck) in a parade starting at 9am and a booth/tent at the park immediately following, from 9:30-1:00pm or so. We’ve decided it would be excellent exposure for DHF and for the gala; we will be able to interact firsthand with many of Dallas’ most influential families and decision makers. Since we will not have a BOD/FRC meeting before July 4th, we need to do a call for volunteers and for services via email/phone. Melissa will be on site, but both Meredith and myself have long-standing plans to be out of town, so please let us know how you can help.

Everything will be “Christmas in July” themed. We hope to decorate our “float” and booth with christmas decorations and have SANTA on site for kids to take pictures with (and we will email them the pictures so that we can get their email addresses and keep in touch with them!) Here is what we need, from services/goods to volunteer opportunities: At the Parade, we need:
*Kids and parents who would like to ride on the float starting at 8:30AM. We would prefer patients of course. They will need to either dress like elves (if we can get our hands on costumes!) or in red, green or white tshirts or other comparable christmas/holiday attire.

*Sponsorship on candy to be thrown from the float to the kids on the street below (gum, now & laters, soft candies are preferable. The Holmeses recommend at least 30 large bags from Sams/Costco.)

*Sponsorship on two banners to flank the vehicle.

*2-4 Volunteers who can walk the length of the 2 mile parade route (from University Park City Hall to Highland Park City Hall) and hand out the hundreds of Save the date flyers we have left over. This was an excellent suggestion from Randell, who said it’s a great way to directly advertise with individuals who may sponsor or attend and by walking the length of the route and handing the flyers out one by one, it’s very effective.)

*Most importantly, we need someone to offer to drive their pick up truck and/or a flatbed trailer that the kids can ride in. Please let us know asap on this one! At the tent/booth, we need:

*SANTA! We recommend doing 4 1 hour shifts, 9:30-1:30.

*Sponsorship for Santa’s costume: Hat, Coat, Board Shorts, Inner tube, and flippers (Christmas in july, right?) *Sponsorship for booth, $200 (Melissa is working on this)

*Sponsorship for Christmas decorations (or, we can all pull together our christmas decorations. I would say we need at least 2 trees. Kristen suggestion: we may consider incorporating some white & light blue here too since our logo has those colors, and so that we are inclusive of all religions)

*The Holmes have offered to sponsor the materials for the platform and chair for Santa to go on, but we need someone with carpentry skills to build Santa’s platform)

*Sponsorship for bags with Save the Dates, candy canes, etc. to hand out to people when they come by. Randell suggested doing a bag is great because kids are always looking for bags to put their candy in. We also thought sponsored balloons would be great. We still have 85 of the Save the Date goody bags from the Preview Party to hand out, but need at least 150 more.

*Photography services and digitial camera (doesn’t have to be professional) for pics of kids with Santa, again we can do 1 hour shifts.

*At least 3-4 people at the booth each hour to sell tickets, push sponsorship levels, and hand out underwriting packets. Sorry for so much information! Randell estimates that 30,000 people attend this event, so if we are well prepared, it will be a great showing for DHF! Any and all ideas are much appreciated.

Thanks! Kristen