Waiving Race Fees for Fundraisers

Many races raise money for charity. One of the common practices is to offer free entry to runners who raise a minimum amount for the charity. Many large marathons like Boston, New York and Pittsburgh even reserve slots for charity fundraisers.

The RunSignUp Fundraising 2.0 platform has been designed to address all of the aspects of this for races and charities:

• Set Minimum fundraising goals
• Set dedicated fundraising slots even if normal registration is full
• Fundraisers have their own dedicated Fundraising Pages with full reporting
• Fundraisers can be linked to one or more specific charities
• Reports for Fundraiser Goal Achievement
• Tools to encourage Fundraisers to meet their goals
• Tools to remove or charge fundraisers who do not meet goals

Setting up Waiving Race Fees for Fundraisers
Set up is part of the overall Donation setup. You can turn on this capability on a per event basis (for example turn it on for the Marathon and Half Marathon, but not the 5K). You can also set up a number of dedicated slots for fundraisers. This allows fundraisers to join even though the event is sold out to for-pay participants. You can also set up date deadlines as well as create “All Fundraiser” events so that everyone in an event has to become a fundraiser. This gives you a lot of flexibility to have a regular Marathon and a Fundraiser Marathon category and ask special custom questions, easily identify Fundraisers for special bib printing, etc.

Becoming a Fundraiser
Becoming a fundraiser is part of the registration process in RunSignUp. We automatically detect if a runner has become a fundraiser and agreed to raise the amount specified by the race/charity (or more). If they do, then the registration fee is waived. If they sign up for less (for example to raise $50 as a fundraiser, not a $500 minimum for example), then the registration fee still applies.

The screen shot on the right is part of the registration process for the race that displays if the person agrees to be a fundraiser. In this case, she has agreed to raise $500 and therefore will have her race fee waived.

Fundraiser Pages
As seen above, fundraisers can create their own Fundraiser page. It offers a variety of options like scrolling list of donors a goal “thermometer”, a picture and their own message.

A fundraiser also has the ability to edit this page at any time, and see reports of donors. There is also the ability easily share their page. The fundraiser can even make a short URL, or even embed a widget in their own blog or webpage.

Managing Fundraisers
There is a Fundraiser Report that you can use to show all fundraisers as well as fundraisers who have not yet met the minimum as shown on the right.

The race director/charity can send emails to the fundraisers to remind them they still have to meet their minimums. Fundraisers can also be removed from the race with a simple click of a button.

You can also download full information on fundraisers including all the specifics of their donations and donors in a csv / Excel file.

We do not believe in charging credit cards for remaining amounts. The fundraiser can be instructed to make a donation to their own fundraiser as the deadline approaches and they have not met their goal. We feel there are too many things that can go wrong and bad karma created. For example, if the person no longer has the money to make up the difference, it may cause a very bad feeling about the charity or race on the part of a person who wanted to fundraise for the charity.

Conclusion
RunSignUp’s ability to combine donations and fundraising as a tight part of the whole race registration process is a powerful tool for race directors and charities. Let us know if you see other ways we can help your race!