Less than six months from now, on April 17, 2006, I’ll be pounding the pavement once again from Hopkinton to Boston, determinedly putting one foot in front of another for more than 26 long, arduous miles.

It’ll be the 8th time I’ve taken the same exhausting journey. And I’ll be tired and sore most of the way. But as I’ve said before, it doesn’t get any better than crossing the finish line of what is arguably the most prestigious road race in the world, the Boston Marathon. I’ve enjoyed running since I was just a little boy, so for me, running Boston is still the thrill of a lifetime, a childhood dream come remarkably true.

I’m lucky, though. Some children’s dreams are mercilessly dashed due to dread, debilitating diseases and disorders that you and I can’t even begin to imagine. Their challenge isn’t a marathon – it is life itself, one difficult day at a time, courageously contending with poor health, waiting for a cure, hoping to prevail despite seemingly overwhelming odds.

It’s for these children that I’m running the Boston Marathon in 2006. Yes, as much as I’m excited to be among the marathon field of some 20,000 athletes, it’s much more important that I’ll be running as one of the few, proud members of Children’s Hospital’s Miles for Miracles Team Boston, raising funds for one of the best pediatric hospitals in the country, located right here in Boston.

Please help me help make dreams come true for more boys and girls. Please sponsor my Boston Marathon run with a gift of $25, $15, $50 or more to Children’s Hospital Boston. I’ll be so grateful for your support. And so will the hospital.

To make a secure, online donation, simply click here or follow these directions…

1. Go to http://www.childrenshospital.org/bostonmarathon.
2. Click on “Sponsor a Runner/Give Online” on the right-hand side
of the screen.
3. Enter my name, “Bob Cargill” and/or my Profile ID (CB0022) in
the “Search for a Runner to Sponsor” fields.
4. Click on my name, “Bob Cargill,” under Search Results, in the middle of the page.
5. Donate to Children’s Hospital Boston.

Of course, if you prefer, you may write a check – payable to Children’s Hospital Boston – and return it to my attention at 33 Oakwood Avenue, Sudbury, MA 01776.

Hailey, 7, My Children’s Hospital Boston Patient Partner

Your generosity will help Children’s Hospital Boston help children like my patient partner, Hailey (see photo above), a cute, little girl living with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), a rare genetic disorder – characterized by bones that break easily, often from little or no apparent cause – for which there is not yet a cure.

Imagine, Hailey is only seven (she was born on May 26, 1998), but she’s already suffered 51 broken bones and undergone a number of serious surgeries. Thanks to Children’s Hospital, however, Hailey’s OI is under control, and she’s living her young life to the fullest.

Your sponsorship of my run will mean a great deal to me, but it’ll mean even more to the doctors, nurses and staff at Children’s Hospital Boston – and the patients in their care.

So please give us as much as you possibly can – today. I’ll appreciate it. The hospital will appreciate it. And, most of all, the children (especially Hailey) will appreciate it. It is on their behalf that I just can’t thank you enough.

Bob

P.S. When you sponsor my Boston Marathon run with a contribution of at least $30, you’ll be entered into a drawing to win one of several fabulous gift certificates donated by Boston-area restaurants and stores.

So please sponsor my participation in the Boston Marathon with a gift of $30 or more to Children’s Hospital Boston. I’ll be so grateful for your support. And if you’re one of the winners of my prize drawing on March 1, 2006, maybe I’ll treat you to dinner, or a pair of movie passes, a free oil change, etc. Good luck. And – much more importantly – thank you for your good deed.

Note: Thank you, by the way, for indulging me while I share all this with you. It’s my own personal fundraising campaign — which I do hope you can support — on behalf of Children’s Hospital Boston. To read about the other four times I’ve run the Boston Marathon for charity, click here, here, here, here and here.

The New England Direct Marketing Association has just issued its Call for Speakers for NEDMA ’06: It’s a Brave New World, a conference and exposition to be held on June 14-15, 2006, at the Bentley College campus center in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Interested parties are invited to submit their proposals no later than November 23 if they want to be involved in what promises to serve as an extraordinary direct marketing “think tank” for all of New England and beyond.”

“Help your fellow direct marketers get connected to the future,” says Craig Blake, vice president of the association and chair of the conference, in his official Call for Speakers. “Demonstrate how you have created this brave new world by re-constructing the old ways…innovating new technology and techniques…merging direct marketing with other forms of advertising and communication…setting new benchmarks, opening new opportunities, changing how we do business forever.”

“If your proposal is selected,” continues Blake, “you will receive free conference registration and an invitation to the exclusive Movers & Shakers Reception as well as that all-important recognition, publicity and fame.”

Only proposals submitted on a form provided by NEDMA will be accepted for consideration. To get yours, drop a quick line to Email NEDMA. If you have any questions, feel free to write to me at Email Bob Cargill or leave a comment below. As co-chair of the conference, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

P.S. In addition to putting out its Call for Speakers, the association also unveiled a new logo (above) for NEDMA ‘06, designed by Doug Hamer of DS Hamer Design.

Thanks to noted corporate blog strategist, B.L. Ochman, I recently caught wind of yet another smart organization that’s shed its Web site entirely and instead staked a claim in the blogosphere.

Union Square Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm, turned its site into a blog because, as they say, “We realized that our thesis evolves incrementally as a result of our dialogue with the market, and that the best way to manage that was to accept that we would never get to an answer, so we should just publish the conversation. The best way to do that is with a blog…”

Good for them. And good for those of us already here in the blogosphere who have had to be so patient with the naysayers and uninformed, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before mainstream corporate America wakes up and joins us.

As B.L. says on her own blog, “A blog is just a simple type of website software, with a built-in searchable database. Nothing mysterious or complicated about it. In the hands of a good designer, a company’s visual identity and branding can be integrated into the blog design. The advantage is easy updating, easy RSS integration, the ability to add video and audio.”

And then some.

It was inevitable that both DIRECT and DM News would eventually establish a presence in the blogosphere, but what’s the chance of two of my favorite trade publications launching their own respective blogs just days apart?

As a dyed-in-the-wool direct marketer who just so happens to write a blog, I can’t help but be beside myself.

Yes, as if it wasn’t exciting enough to see that DIRECT was finally blogging on Wednesday, I almost fell off my chair when less than 24 hours later DM News announced that its blog was now “open for business.”

Of course, the near simultaneous debut of these two blogs is more than just a coincidence. Both promise to provide extensive, live coverage of DMA.05, The Direct Marketing Association’s Conference & Exhibition taking place this Saturday through next Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia.

One of them, in fact, DIRECT’s DirectBuzz Blog, appears to have been created as a conference blog exclusively.

“Welcome to DirectBuzz,” says Ray Schultz in the blog’s first post,” our DMA05 conference blog. We’re starting today because we want to build up a head of steam and cause some trouble before we even get to Atlanta.”

On the other hand, the DM News Blog looks like it’s in it for the long haul with more than just conference talk.

“What do DMA*05, the U.S. Army and Jan Brady have in common? Nothing much except all are already mentioned in DM News’ newest venture: the DM News Blog,” writes Tad Clarke. “The blog is live today and features the musings of our crackerjack staff of reporters on the world of direct marketing and beyond.”

Regardless of their level of popularity over the course of the next week or so, here’s betting that both of these blogs will be around for a long time to come. Their publishers will learn very quickly what you and I already know – that once you’ve entered the blogosphere, there’s no turning back.

Convio, the leading provider of software and services to help nonprofit organizations use the Internet for driving support, recently announced the release of Convio Tributes, a “constituent-led fundraising solution” that lets a nonprofit effectively leverage supporters and take, as the company says, “Internet fundraising to a new level.”

With Convio Tributes, a nonprofit can provide its constituents with online tools to quickly and easily create their own highly personalized Web sites for fundraising in honor or memory of a friend or relative. Supporters also can use their Web pages to help recruit new constituents and put a personal face on the nonprofit’s mission.

Although many nonprofits provide such tools to people participating in events such as walks and races, Convio Tributes lets supporters raise money, generate awareness and recruit others on an ongoing basis, independent of a special event.

This is more than just a great idea. This is the idea of “friends-telling-friends,” or viral marketing, bent and shaped to near perfection.

In taking what is already a successful model – adopted by such pledge-based fundraising events as the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge or the Boston Marathon Charity Program – minus the event, Convio appears to have, in effect, built a better mousetrap.

This means a nonprofit organization doesn’t necessarily have to stage or be associated with a costly, complicated community extravaganza of any size, shape or form in order to exponentially, not just incrementally, expand its core audience.

This means the more passionate donors among us will have a powerful outlet for disseminating – and, ideally, propagating – their feelings on behalf of their cause.

I can’t think of a much better way for a nonprofit to involve so many of its constituents in its mission and to encourage them to evangelize on its behalf.

Like a good, old-fashioned blog, Convio Tributes seems to be using social software to make possible a new, mutually-beneficial global conversation that might not have occurred otherwise.

Seth Godin has just announced the release of his next free ebook, Everyone’s An Expert, which you can download here. The book, he says, “is for anyone who wants more online traffic, more revenue, more followers, more attention, more interest, more donations or more influence.”

It’s a short book – you can read it in about ten minutes – about his exciting, new online company, Squidoo, and, as Seth says, “more important, about a new sort of online tool that might very well change the way you discover (and publish) information.”

This new tool (which has to do with the development of a “lens,” described by Seth as a “a page, a single page, that highlights one person’s view of the Web – not the whole Web, just one tiny part of it”) sounds like a great idea to me, an idea that should at least pique the curiosity of any one person or organization in the business of marketing communications today.

For now, you can read more about all this on Seth’s own blog. In no time at all, though, you’ll probably be reading about Everyone’s An Expert and Squidoo wherever you go in the blogosphere. Like a fire ablaze in dry brush, anything new from Seth Godin — one of the world’s foremost marketing experts and business entrepreneurs — has a way of spreading fast.

“Instead of detailing workouts in a private training diary, runners are now logging their workouts on the Web for friends, teammates, and long-distance training partners to read and respond to,” writes Chaddus Bruce in the October 2005 issue of Runner’s World (“Today I Ran Fast – Keeping A Training Blog Can Help You Get Fit And Focused”).

This is something I myself experimented with a little of last spring when I blogged a few times about running the Boston Marathon for charity.

This is also something I have suggested to my fellow runners and friends at the Greater Framingham Running Club.

A blog – as companion to a more traditional Web site – would be the ideal online self-publishing platform for any club for that matter, running-related or not.

To get a good idea what a training blog looks like, click here, here , here and, last but not least, here (where you’ll find Chaddus Bruce’s own blog).