Organize an Event – A Planning Guide
Choose Event Activities – Plan Entertainment

Choose Event Activities:
• Choose a Program
• Pick a Theme
• Plan Entertainment
• Educate
• Find a Speaker
• Honor Survivors
• Serve Festive Food
• Decorate

Incorporating activities into your event can help assure that a good time is had by all. Try a few of these time-tested ideas:

• Set up a craft table as an alternative to physically demanding games. Attendees can create a memento of the event using paint, wood, clay, or other craft supplies. Encourage local businesses to sponsor individual craft tables.
• Celebrations can include games, such as bingo and table tennis, with donated prizes for the winners.
• Carnivals might include pie throwing, pie eating contests, cake walks, pony rides, sack races, water balloon fights, smile contests, dunking booths to dunk treatment center staff, jugglers, fortune tellers, and egg tosses. The games can be offered free or used as a fundraiser for your cancer-fighting organization.
• Hold your event at an arcade or fun park and encourage survivors to challenge their doctors, nurses, and other healthcare team members at the games.
• Plan age-appropriate activities for children, such as story-telling, games, face painting, skits, pony rides, moonwalks, inflatable slides, a fish pond, kite flying, and puppet shows.
• Ask magicians and local athletic teams’ mascots to entertain.
• Make your games cancer-specific by building a putt-putt golf course using bedpans as “holes,” or by playing “shoot the chemo bag,” “throw the pill bottle,” or win the “wig toss.”
• Offer hot air balloon rides.
• Hold a hat contest or provide materials to create original hats.
• Give out silly props like kazoos and red clown noses to help people loosen up.
• Games such as softball, soccer, volleyball, and golf lend themselves well to celebrity participation and promote team building.
• Major sports teams in your area may agree to sponsor an event at their game. Have a survivor throw the first pitch at a local baseball game, have a survivor hold the flag during the national anthem, offer a moment of silence for those touched by cancer, and distribute NCSD materials to those attending. Recognize and salute NCSD and local cancer survivor heroes on the field and on the scoreboard/message board. Host a picnic at the ballpark before the game; ask team members to have an autograph signing session. Organize a colorful balloon parade around the perimeter of the field during the seventh inning stretch.
• Hold a fashion show. Cancer survivors make wonderful models for clothing, wigs, turbans, and scarves.
• An antique car show is a great visual event that will draw non-survivors, providing a perfect opportunity to raise awareness.
• Concerts and music can enhance your celebration. Performing groups of any genre (jazz, country, blues, classical, barbershop quartets) add flavor. Consider a pianist, harpist, guitarist, string quartet, or high school band to provide background music.
• Sing-alongs and karaoke create camaraderie.
• Hire a disc jockey (or ask one to volunteer his or her time) to play music that goes with your theme.
• Ask a dance school or professional troupe to entertain.

2011 Event Coverage and Photos

2010 Event Coverage and Photos

2009 Event Coverage and Photos