When junior Emily Hernandez and senior Noah Chakroun, co-presidents of Relay for Life, read the number $157,857.42 while standing on Peabody Lawn on Nov. 5, 2016, they “lost it,” Hernandez said. As co-presidents of Vanderbilt’s chapter of Relay for Life, they had spent months working toward their $150,000 goal. In the minutes before the big reveal, their advisor from the American Cancer Society had pulled them aside, telling them that they weren’t going to make it. When the numbers flashed on the screen that night, they realized that they had far exceeded all expectations.

This year’s Relay for Life was monumental for many reasons. Hernandez and Chakroun led a team of over 125 Vanderbilt students working to raise money to donate to the American Cancer Society for research. The Relay campaign this year beat all past Vanderbilt campaigns. When Vanderbilt Relay first started, fundraising goals capped at around $10,000.

This year marked Vanderbilt’s fifteenth Relay event, which they called BonnaRelay. It has been recognized as the number one national college Relay per capita as well as the largest service organization on Vanderbilt’s campus. Months of fundraising culminated in a twelve-hour event on Peabody Lawn featuring performances from the Melodores and other student organizations as well as guest appearances. Hernandez and Chakroun had been planning this event since they became co-presidents during the spring of last year.

“When we sat down to plan for this year, we knew that we wanted to push ourselves,” Hernandez said. “We calculated down to the very number how many participants we were going to need, how many teams with X-amount of people, how much ticket prices were, and how hard our board members would have to work to hit their certain fundraising goals.”

Hernandez and Chakroun’s Relay campaign was perhaps most notable for its creative fundraising methods and advertising techniques. Both of them had served on the marketing team before becoming presidents, so they relied heavily on innovative marketing methods to meet their fundraising goal.

“We pretty much green-lighted any idea” Noah recalls.

The notorious “Ask Lindsey” campaign, which featured hundreds of red stickers and posters telling Commons residents to “Ask Lindsey,” became a trademark for Relay this year. Lindsey Jones is a young woman whose childhood cancer caused her to go blind. She appeared at Vanderbilt’s first Relay event and returned to speak at this year’s Relay.

Vanderbilt’s “Relay 100” initiative asked each Relay member to raise $100 in one day. Board members raised well over $14,000 in one day. Relay 100 was such a success that the logo has been used at other schools and the national Relay office is working to promote the tactic on a national level.

“The purpose of the campaign was to make it more personal because we were reaching out to people that we cared about in our lives and sharing our stories” Hernandez explained.

Relay’s digital media team promoted the event with bold graphics and videos. One video of Hernandez and Chakroun asking Bachelorette contestant Wells Adams to help Vanderbilt Relay resulted in Adams coming to the Nov. 5 event and taking pictures with fans.

Vanderbilt Relay’s success could be attributed to its willingness to take risks as well as the tireless efforts of the entire team. When seventy-five first-year students applied this fall, Hernandez and Chakroun decided to add positions to Relay Board and doubled its size overnight. Every member of the board played a significant role in Relay’s monumental success.

“We have so many strong people on board and I am so excited to see what they can bring to the organization” Hernandez said..

While Chakroun will graduate this year, he will continue to help Hernandez, who will serve as president again next year, begin to plan for next year’s event.

All photos courtesy of Vanderbilt Relay for Life.