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Collector's pin

Artist's Concept

The theme of the 2018 Rose Parade is Making a Difference. Our float will be titled Sacrifice to Serve and honors all recipients of the Purple Heart medal. The riders on the float include purple heart recipients and dignitaries of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The float will be decorated with many types of floral material including a bed of 11,000 red roses and 1,000 white roses.
Parade Day

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On January 1st, 2018 the Odd Fellows Rebekahs Tournament of Roses Parade float completed its 5.5 mile journey along Colorado Blvd in Pasadena California. Our 2018 float was titled Sacrifice to Serve and honored all recipients of the Purple Heart medal. The riders on our 2018 float include seven purple heart recipients and several dignitaries of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. On December 13th KTLA-TV interviewed two of our purple heart recipients at the float.


Float Judging

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The 2018 Tournament of Roses judging of floats for parade trophies was held the morning of December 31st, 2017. Our float was one of the leading units in the parade (4th overall position) following only the sponsor (Honda), the Marine Corps Mounted Color Guard and the Marine Corps band. We received the Director's Trophy for most outstanding artistic design.


December 26th

December 23rd

December 16th

December 9th

Float Public Relations Impact

On January 1st, 2018, the number of Google searches for "Odd Fellows" (plotted in blue), "Rebekahs" (plotted in yellow) and "Odd Fellows Rebekahs" (the actual name as seen on our float, plotted in red) ran about 2X the typical number of daily searches for those terms. The graph below plots the number of daily searches relative to the maximum number of daily searches covering the months of December 2017 and January 2018. The maximum number of daily searches occurred on December 22 and has been normalized to a value of 100%. These searches originated from all across the USA.

Google searches for "Odd Fellows" clearly dominate the data and were fairly consistent throughout the year with a small local maximum on January 1st. Searches for the term "Odd Fellows Rebekahs", the actual name that appears on our float, were almost non existent throughout the year except for a January 1st spike registering at about 22% of the number of searches for "Odd Fellows" on that date. Searches for "Odd Fellows Rebekahs" can only be explained by people who saw the float.

Interestingly, for this specific float, we did not find the maximum number of searches occuring on January 1st. Something happened on December 22nd that generated tremendous interest in Odd Fellowship. There were essentially no searches for "Odd Fellows Rebekahs" on December 22nd, so whatever prompted searches on December 22nd was not viewing the float itself, but might have been something related to the float such as a TV news broadcast. If so, viewers who investigated Odd Fellowship on December 22nd would be unlikely to search once again on January 1st. Data for December 22 reveals that many of the searches on that date originated from Oklahoma.