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Hatterthon at Stetson University Receives 2020 Participant Communication Award

Hatterthon at Stetson University was awarded the Participant Communication Award at Dance Marathon Leadership Conference 2020. The Participant Communication Award recognizes programs that have been successful in communicating with their registered participants through a variety of channels throughout the entire year, educating their participants about their organization and the cause. 

Hatterthon focused on two key areas of communication this year: communication with team captains and communication with participants. For both of these groups, the program emphasized education and knowledge sharing; education on how to fundraise, education on the hospital and their cause, and education about organization events.  

When it came to team captains, Hatterthon dug in and thought about the best avenues to use to communicate with team captains. They still held their in-person team captain meetings, but they offered one-on-one meetings for any team captains that could not make the group meetings and created GroupMes with all team captains to share real-time information with them on important days and pushes. Most of the information that was shared in GroupMe was created so that team captains could take the messages and share them directly with their teams as well, ensuring that communication with reaching every registered participant. Hatterthon also created a Team Captains Google Drive, as a one-stop-shop for all team captain resources and educational materials. This ensured that team captains could access information at any point and share it with their teammates. You can see Hatterthon’s team captain guide, here 

Similarly to how they communicated with team captains, Hatterthon used a variety of methods and tools to communicate with their participants. At the beginning of the year, they realized a lot of their DonorDrive emails were getting caught up in spam filters or junk mailboxes, so they decided to start sending all email communication from their Hatterthon Outlook email address, to get as many eyes on them as possible. They found that the more they could segment and personalize these emails, the better! In addition to email communication, Hatterthon utilized text messages to connect with participants throughout the year. These texts would include important fundraising announcements, links to resources, and much more. For all of the communication that Hatterthon sent out through the year, head here.


Miracle Network Dance Marathon is an international movement, involving over 400 colleges, universities and K-12 schools across North America that fundraise for their local Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Since its inception in 1991, Miracle Network Dance Marathon has raised more than $300 million–ensuring that no child or family fights pediatric illness or injury alone.

Learn more about Miracle Network Dance Marathon:

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