Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Race for the cure (of a different sort)

Seth Gaffney is a strategic planner at Weiden + Kennedy New York. He’s also a blogger, a runner and a Barack Obama supporter. While doing a training run in preparation for the New York Marathon he started thinking about how he might use the race—which will happen two days before Election Day—as a forum for a pro-Obama (Probama?) statement.

He shared this desire with his friend Clay and the germ of an idea began to grow. (Here’s the GChat snippet.)


What they’ve ended up with—not even two weeks later—is Obama Baton.

The idea is pretty clear: runners who are involved will pass a relay baton during the marathon, with the culmination—the baton crossing the finish line—as a sign of their commitment to inspire action and change.

Seth and crew have taken the very simple notion of a marathon and have added a motivated community to create something that’s really impressive. They’ve got a website (of course), a Facebook group, a Twitter account, logos, batons for the race… And they've expanded it to include the Chicago marathon, too.

Their energy for the idea is really something. And I bet not one ounce of it seems like work.

Feeling inspired yet?

Read all about it on Seth's blog.

2 comments:

Seth said...

mark, thanks so much for the props. hit me up and come on out for a training run!

Anonymous said...

Mark - quite right. It doesn't seem like work at all. But I guess that's the beauty of the new web (hesitate to call it web 2.0)... in 9 days, you can go from a chatroom to a site, with 87 twitter followers, over 90 folks in Facebook groups and plenty of good comments flowing on the site by day 13. I imagine by the Monday after the Chicago race we'll have plenty more. And then by the time it hits NYC, we should have a real movement on our hands.

Hopefully! Thanks for doing your part and helping out.