Charity Sportives - Would you fundraise?

[KidsCan]

Hi Everyone,

For the past few years, we’ve organised The Macc Monster – www.maccmonster.co.uk – The cycle sportive in aid of Kidscan, the children’s cancer research charity.

As the event is organised to raise vital funds for our childhood cancer research, we offer sponsor materials to everyone taking part. However, the vast majority of people taking part choose not to fundraise. This is entirely their choice, but in order to make the event worthwhile for the charity, we’re hoping that more people will be keen to fundraise.

We are more than happy to provide people with sponsorship materials in order to make their fundraising as easy as possible.
This can include:
•   Personalised sponsor forms
•   A JustGiving.com or VirginMoneyGiving online sponsor page
•   A Text To Donate code

My questions for you are as follows.
1)   Would you be prepared to take part in a cycle sportive and pay the entry fee (£20) if you were also required to raise minimum sponsorship amount – e.g. £50 or £100
2)   Would you be happier to raise the minimum sponsorship amount – e.g. £50/£100 if you did not have to pay to take part in the sportive?

If you’re able to answer these two questions I would really appreciate hearing back from you.
Thank you for your time.

The Kidscan Team.

[Kim]

While I'm reasonably happy to pay a higher-than-costs entry fee when the money is going to good causes, I - and I suspect many on here - would feel awkward actively seeking sponsorship for something we'd do for fun anyway^[1].  As such, a required minimum sponsorship would discourage me from entering, irrespective of the entry fee.

I'd suggest a much higher entry fee for those who choose not to fundraise.


_{[1] A notable exception being when I've accompanied less experienced riders on sponsored rides, where I've made active effort to encourage people to sponsor *them*.}

[KidsCan]

While I'm reasonably happy to pay a higher-than-costs entry fee when the money is going to good causes, I - and I suspect many on here - would feel awkward actively seeking sponsorship for something we'd do for fun anyway^[1].  As such, a required minimum sponsorship would discourage me from entering, irrespective of the entry fee.

I'd suggest a much higher entry fee for those who choose not to fundraise.

_{[1] A notable exception being when I've accompanied less experienced riders on sponsored rides, where I've made active effort to encourage people to sponsor *them*.}

Hi Kim,

I really appreciate you getting in touch.
We hadn't thought about doing two separate entry fees. I suppose there's no guarantee that someone who takes the cheaper entry will actually raise their promised sponsorship.
Sorry to sound cynical! We've seen it before!

How much would you be happy paying if you didn't have to raise any sponsorship?
Likewise, how much would you expect to pay if you were asked to raise e.g. £50?

[Charlotte]

What Kim said.  The only time I have *ever* asked people to sponsor me on a bicycle ride was when I was riding LEJOG in six days.  At over 150 miles a day, I was genuinely at the limit of what I considered I was capable of on a bicycle.

I would be embarrassed to ask for sponsorship for an event that everyone knew I was capable of.  That includes the vast majority of 'sportive' rides.

[tom_e]

1)   Would you be prepared to take part in a cycle sportive and pay the entry fee (£20) if you were also required to raise minimum sponsorship amount – e.g. £50 or £100

No

2)   Would you be happier to raise the minimum sponsorship amount – e.g. £50/£100 if you did not have to pay to take part in the sportive?

No

Like Kim, I would not be comfortable asking my friends to pay money for me to go on a bike ride and enjoy myself.  If that is what you want, you probably need to advertise to non-cyclists rather than cyclists.  I'm looking for a straight deal - I do bike ride, I pay money.

I suppose that leaves just being upfront and charging a higher fee but explicitly saying how much of it is going to the charity.  If the raw entry is £20 then maybe I might be happy to pay up to another £20 to the charity.  This is clearly less than the sponsorship amounts you are hoping for, but I think the argument above then applies - regular cyclists are not likely to want to pay a lot of money to go on a bike ride!  For that you need to target people for whom this will be a special event.

[fuaran]

I think all of the sponsorship money should go to the charity. The costs of the event should be paid by the participant (or commercial sponsors). I think its wrong to ask for sponsorship if it is subsidising me to have a nice day out, and not all going towards a 'worthwhile cause'.

Like what the others say, I wouldn't ask people for sponsorship unless it was a 'special' event. Maybe particularly difficult, or interesting, or a specific charity I wanted to support.

If its a nice event, I would be happy to pay a reasonable entry fee myself, plus pay a 'suggested donation' on top of that.

[caerau]

I've never been comfortable asking people to sponsor me to do anything.  If I want to donate to a charity I just do it rather than feel the need to complete some sort of stunt.  I'm not very comfortable with sponsored events going hand in hand with big commercial organisations like Wiggle or Evans either - nice touchy feely bit of advertising for them no?  Is their heart really in the right place?


I suspect you're on a poor forum for the feedback you might be wanting to hear.  Charity riding seems to be looked upon negatively in this forum in my (admittedly slightly limited) experience.  There's more sportive types over at Bikeradar but I suspect you're over there asking already anyway.


I'd be happy to pay a higher entry fee if I felt I wanted to donate to that particular charity mind you.  But not exorbitant - maybe 10 or 20 pounds extra.  But then I've fallen in love with audax and probably won't ride a sportive again - certainly not in the near future.

[KidsCan]

Hi everyone,

Thank you very much for all your comments.
They're extremely helpful.
I know it may seem a bit cheeky to ask you all things like this, but as you can imagine, we're trying to work out how to make the event as enjoyable as possible while making sure it's value for money and... most importantly!... raises as much as it can for the charity.

Not an easy task as you can tell!

[The_Mikey]

     I wouldn't be comfortable raising funds for a charity bike ride, partially because I'd feel a fraud for raising money to do something I enjoy,  and partly because the anxiety involved would probably cause me to avoid the event and raise no money anyway.


     The cost of sportives is excessive already, it's unlikely that I'd pay £50 to ride a sportive unless it was in support of something that I specifically wanted to support, or did something that was different to any other sportive.

[vorsprung]

My questions for you are as follows.
1)   Would you be prepared to take part in a cycle sportive and pay the entry fee (£20) if you were also required to raise minimum sponsorship amount – e.g. £50 or £100
2)   Would you be happier to raise the minimum sponsorship amount – e.g. £50/£100 if you did not have to pay to take part in the sportive?

Personally, these ideas are a 100 miles away from any idea I would have of charitable giving.  What might attract me to entering a Sportive which supported a charity I liked would be, in a sense, the opposite of those two questions.

I'd like to know how much I should pay up front to the event organisers to entirely cover all my expenses in the event.  By this I mean all admin, supplied food, hall hire, advertising costs - all the money required to actually have the event, assuming the expected field takes part.  If you could charge me this amount then I could fund raise further $$$ knowing that no one I was asking was paying for my weekend fun.

It's more likely that I wouldn't bother fund raising from people I know based on an event.  I'd just give some money to the charity and go on a bike ride unconnected to it.

[PaulR]

My only experience of a charity ride like this was a ride from Paris to London to raise funds for GOSH Children's Charity.  Part of my reason for participating (well, the main reason actually) was the fact that I was invited by a friend whose (late) daughter had been cared for by GOSH.  But it was also helpful that the organisers (a trading company owned by the charity, rather than a third party event organiser) offered us the option of paying the £450 or whatever it was that would completely cover the cost of the ride, thus ensuring that every penny we raised went to the charity.

Even then, it felt a bit odd asking people to donate, as it was still perceived by many in a sort of "wow, that's a long way to ride on a push bike" light.

[teethgrinder]

All I am interested in is doing the bike ride.
If I think it is good enough value for money and something that I'd like to do and worth the hassle of traveling to, then I'll ride it, unless it clashes with a better offer.
I do a lot of rides and I'm really not interested in trying to get people to sponsor me. It's a lot of effort and I doubt I'd raise very much anyway, so I'd never do a ride with a minimum sponsorship.

What would work for me is to make me an offer. Ride this event for £X and £Y will go to charity. Riders can still be encouraged to get sponsored for their ride. Cance Research has a ridiculously easy ride around Milton Keynes which does this.
I will be helping to run a sportive event in October with my cycling club.
Entry is £10 for the 52 mile ride and it will make some cash for the local hospital charity, just as it always has done. It's only a small cycling club and not a proper event organisation, so is run by volunteers which keeps the running cost right down. We got about 200 riders last year.

I think that it depends on what type of event you have.
If it's a very tough challenge of an event, then you should aim for people to raise big money. At the other end, like in the Milton Keynes family ride which children also rode, then it's a matter of stack em high and sell em cheap for a big turnover.
I think that your event is closer to the stack em high category in that it's not a super tough event, it's more of a nice day out. People aren't going to spend all year building up to and planning this ride. It's something I'd do on a whim. And because of that, I don't think that you need to have a lot of whistles and bells.
Our club sportive will give each rider tea, cakes and a sandwhich at the finish, a signed route with a few marshals, a time (I think we get this done extra cheap because of people with connections, I know that timing chips etc are expensive to hire) and not a great deal else.
I think that we raised about £1300 for the local hospital and that was without asking people to raise sponsorhip, it was just giving the profit to charity.
It will be the newcomers to cycling and non cyclists who go and get sponsorship, not people who allready cycle regularly.

How much would I pay to ride my club sportive? It costs £10, which I think is pretty good. £15 would be about the limit for a 50 miler, but if it was a very big event, obviously raising money for charity, had lots (1000+) of riders and a few extra bits, then £20 seems understandably expensive if it's a very good event.

I've still yet to ride a sportive, but am thinking of riding The Rut, organised by Wiggle. About 100 miles of very nice route with a few feed stations, a time (which I don't really care very much about) and not much else. This costs just under £40 which is about my limit of what I think is reasonable. I may re-think that either way after riding it, which is one reason I'm thinking of riding it.

[mattc]

(to cut a long story short ...)
to Steve's volunteer-based, honest fundraiser
  to commercial organisers making a profit under the name of 'charidee'


_{[I make no statement as to what events fall into which of the above categories. Many are somewhere in-between.]}

If approached by a rider for donations, I'd be much happier to pay if:
- they were riding a 'type 1' event,
- they convinced me the ride was enough of a challenge that they wanted the motivation of donations, and
- they were paying their own entry fee.

_{Other combinations exist - they can get complicated.}

[Basil]

I'd be uncomfortable asking people for money to do something they know I'd be doing anyway most weekends.
I don't do sportifs.  Never really seen the point of paying to do something that I do for free.

I've done a couple of charidy rides.  Paid my entry fee, added an optional donation, but never tried to fund raise.

You'd probably be better off targeting people who are not already keen cyclists.  Cut your distance and encourage people to ride 25 miles for charady.  Easier to organise and you'd probably get a greater take up.

[De Sisti]

@Kidscan,


Why don't you ask some of the big financial institutions for a donation? They're loaded with more
money than they know what to do with. Just a thought.

[Lady Cavendish]

I agree about targeting people other than those who already ride a lot. I ride sportives and audaxes a lot so can't see why people would now sponsor me to ride something I do all the time.

Newer or less regular cyclists I'm sure would though. Quite a lot of people I know that don't usually cycle did that Ride London jobby and raised a lot of money for charity which was great. Before I was a cyclist, I also rode one of these London to Paris commercial things, and because it was something new for me, people were keen to sponsor me and I raised nearly £14,000. 

It's just like 'the' marathon isn't it (I think that's the biggest charity day in the country but I could be wrong). People who run a lot don't tend to do it for charity as they enjoy running all the time anyway, but loads of people who don't normally run do it for charity.

Having said I wouldn't fundraise, I would be happy to pay a higher entry fee for a charity sportive than a 'normal' one. I think there is definitely potential to raise a lot of money, it's just that this *probably* isn't the target market.

[Jaded]

Getting sponsorship tends to spoil the event. Plus as others have said, getting sponsorship for a shorter ride than you have dozens of feels a bit false.

[teethgrinder]

to Steve's volunteer-based, honest fundraiser
  to commercial organisers making a profit under the name of 'charidee'

It could be argued that both types of event are using charity as a tool for promotion. Our sportive event could just as easily charge double the entry fee and donate £15 to charity instead of £5. Make it too expensive and you'll very probably have fewer riders.

It could be argued that both types of event are trying their best for charity. A bunch of amateurs can run a small event in their spare time but not a big event to the scale of some sportives.

FWIW I'm volunteering to put something back into cycling, given that I've ridden so many volunteer run cycling events. I'd volunteer whether money went to charity or not and possibly even if it was a commercially run event run by millionaires.

[KidsCan]

Hi Everyone.

Thank you very much for your additional comments. They're very helpful.

While some of you have said "Why not target your event at amateur cyclists?", we target our event at everyone, but when amateur's see 100km and 7000ft of climbs they tend to get put off.
We've had people take over 7 hours to do our ride and I don't think they did it again!

I'm sure there's a happy medium somewhere but it's finding it that's the problem!

[Toady]

Hi Everyone.

Thank you very much for your additional comments. They're very helpful.

While some of you have said "Why not target your event at amateur cyclists?", we target our event at everyone, but when amateur's see 100km and 7000ft of climbs they tend to get put off.
We've had people take over 7 hours to do our ride and I don't think they did it again!

I'm sure there's a happy medium somewhere but it's finding it that's the problem!

Actually, 100k with 7000ft climb to a non regular rider is not so dissimilar to a marathon to a non regular runner, ie a big, but not insurmountable, challenge.  And the big challenges are the things that are really "worth" getting sponsorship for (IMO - other opinions exist).

So if you say "this is something that you will have to train seriously for, and will be a significant acheivement" surely that's the kind of thing that people like to take on as a sponsorship challenge.   And like lots of one-time marathon runners will look back on with pride (and the odd wince).
 
If I was inventing such an event I'd probably make it a 100 miler, as that might resonate with people like the marathon does.  A tough hilly 100k may well actually be tougher but may not have the same cachet.

[mattc]

Dr Hutch totally nails the charity issue in today's CW. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

I'm uncomfortable with the whole idea of sponsorship, both raising and giving. I'd rather just make a donation to a charity I feel is worthwhile. Sponsorship so often feels like paying for someone's holiday.

[mattc]

You are Dr Hutch and ICMFP.

[Cudzoziemiec]

In that case I've only vaguely heard of myself, so you're probably right. Cheque's in the post.

[mattc]

Cheers. Another 99 and that's L'Etape 2014 sorted.