33 days to go. Take a look at the End Polio Now "totaliser" on the right of this page. $200million achieved - (as of 17th January was an astounding $202.7million raised by Rotary around the world).
An amazing achievement, but we all know there is much more work to be done until we can finally say that Polio is no more.
Thinking about my own personal challenge I've set myself around swimarathon, which is to raise £2012 in this Olympic year to be split between End Polio Now and local Grantham Charities I'm very happy to say that I'm off to a great start with £162 raised so far http://www.justgiving.com/PaulWilsonRotary (all new donations always welcome!).
That got me thinking that in terms of the enormous potential for fundraising from the Rotary Global Swimarathon. If just 99 other Rotarian members / friends were able to raise £1000 each - that would raise an incredible £100,000.
Now let's look at where we are now. As of tonight, thanks to two more official registrations today from Madhumita Bishnu of the Rotary Club of Calcutta Uptown in India and BJ Metz of the Rotary Club of Easton Philadelphia USA we already have 55 clubs fully signed up for Global Swimarathon. The early estimates of people taking part in each event average at around 200 people per club. With all the additional fundraising activities built into those events , it would be a fair estimate to say that on average each will be likely to raise £1000-£2000. So between the clubs we already have taking part £100,000 seems entirely achievable.
The wonderful thing is there is really no limit to how many clubs can join us -even at this relatively late stage, events can be kept simple, really all that's needed is a swimming venue , at least 25 people available at the right time of day and your club can be a part of it.
This week we are going all out to get more sign ups. Thanks to some fantastic campaigning by Rotarians out there, most notably from my good friend Susanne Rea in District 9550 who has been phenomenally committed to putting the word out and has helped us get new interest from as far away as Nigeria and Pakistan as well as other clubs in Australia, we really have some incredible momentum going into this week.
The wider world are certainly starting to take note as well. We've got contacts set up here in the UK with Sky Sports News the nationally recognised number 1 sports news channel , British swimming have been retweeting about our event to their many thousands of followers, and earlier this week, US movie legend Mia Farrow gave our event a special mention in her tweets to over 28,000 followers.
Our swimarathon chair Roger Graves (featured in the video above) has now set up on twitter you can follow on http://twitter.com/@gravesrjg and I know he can't wait to help take on the challenge of getting us to 100 clubs signed up. We'll be sending out our latest news update via email to all of the confirmed entrants on Monday so please look out for that. This week we really want to start building up our global map so that not only all the clubs are featured, but the precise venues, the number of swimmers and the fundraising amount raised.
Then we'll create our own version of the totaliser on the right. Our club has already raised £300 for the cause so that'll start us off nicely, but I firmly believe that together we can go well beyond £100,000 and at the same time , share something unique with the wider world. A global swimming event on this scale has never been done before - until now....
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