A friend of mine just posted on facebook:
Is this normal? I would not have expected these “awareness walks” to work like this. (What “coach” is being referred to here, I don’t know, and I don’t know what walk is being referred to exactly, either.)
A friend of mine participates in a charity run, I got the impression it was the same for him. Whatever he couldn’t raise he had to pay himself.
Is this common? Sounds very unethical
I think another way to put it is that $1000 is the cost of admission, however you manage to get it.
That seems high, but it doesn’t seem absurd to me to have a minimum donation. There are very real costs in organizing, publicity, permits, etc.
Compulsory charity isn’t real charity.
Well, you have to consider the fact that you’re only on the hook for the $1000. If you manage to raise *more *than that in donations, you could always pocket it for yourself.
So, (un-)ethically speaking, it all evens out, see? 
It’s not unethical as long as you’re aware of it going in. But as the OP indicated, it would seem to have a chilling effect on getting people to participate.
$1000 might be high, but I don’t think it is for larger events. My cousin did a walk for breast cancer ( I think it was Avon) where she had to commit to raising $1800. I looked at the Avon 39 website and it addresses the question of whether more people would participate- they acknowledge that more people would participate with a lower commitment or none at all , but the aim of this event is to have a manageable number of people participate while raising as much money as possible.
Really, this is the same principle as “Pay $100 to register for our non-profit baseball league and here are 100 tickets to our raffle. You can sell the tickets or keep the tickets- up to you”. It’s just a different scale.
Yup. This is why you should read the fine print before clicking <signup>. Some of the events you can’t ‘drop out’ of; you’ve agreed to give them the minimum when you sign up, whether you drop out (in advance) either because of injury or lack of fundraising success. BTW, $1000 isn’t all that high; I’ve seen from $500 - $5000+.
To answer your second question, the charity does support you. Depending upon the event, you will have a training coach who will work with you (for possibly months) in advance to make sure you are physically ready for the event as well as a fundraising coach/cheerleader who will help/encourage you get to your minimum required fundraising amount.
The norm for a lot of ‘walk type’ events is you need to meet the minimum to participate. If you don’t meet the minimum and choose to participate you are on the hook for it. If you don’t raise enough you can send what you did get and stay home.
I’ve never encountered this in my life, and I’ve participated in a ton of fundraisers. I’ve never seen one where you buy the stuff ahead of time and then sell it. You get the tickets, and either sell them or give them back. What you’re talking about sounds like reselling, which is heavily frowned upon.
And I’d say it’s still different, and worse. It means that the ticket buyers aren’t paying charity, they are paying you back for what you already paid. The charity has already been given its money, and so there’s no benefit to the charity for my buying the tickets. If I encounter a system like that, I wouldn’t buy any tickets. (Paying for a chance to win the prize is always a sucker’s game, as you are paying much more than your expected return. It’s just the lottery problem on a smaller scale.)
That’s not to say I don’t object to this other system. I have an ethical objection to forcing people to make X amount of money to participate. It turns their need for charity into a need for themselves, just like the problem with the ticket system. It turns altruism into selfishness.
Of course, school fundraisers often do this, too. They offer prizes to get you to sell more stuff. But at least in those you are usually selling something that has value on its own, so you get something out of paying besides the warm glow of helping a charity. That goes by the wayside if I’m actually just paying to keep them from paying for themselves. I’m paying them, not the charity.
Plus I can’t imagine how you would enforce this system without it being horrible all around. The only thing that might work is requiring the pledges (or to make it up monetarily) to be allowed participate in the first place. Anything else would be really shitty. I can’t imagine collections coming after me for something I did for a charity.
I mean, I don’t think the ones I’ve given money towards work this way. I can’t imagine any of the people I saw participating having anywhere near that kind of money just to throw around. A lot of them are college students, even. I’ve been a participant in pledge-based fundraisers, and I’ve never had to pay to enter or required to get a certain amount of money.
Heck, I’ve never encountered a charity where a pledge must be upheld. The ones I’ve done you made a pledge, and then you tried your hardest, and if you didn’t make it, you didn’t make it. It might mean you’d lose whatever benefit you’d receive, but that was the only issue. The only exception were the ones where you ordered a product from a catalog. Rarely they would be set up where you paid upon delivery instead of upon purchase–but those are just asking for trouble.
Finally, about ethics: it’s not just the participants who need to know. The contributors need to know, too. I know I would not willingly pay into that sort of system, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that sentiment. I mean, the best case for the charity is that no one pays for the walk, but pays to the charity directly. Then you get the fees from the participants and the extra money.
I’ll definitely be circumspect of any huge walk event from now on. No more just blindly forwarding the info, that’s for sure.
Go back 20 years and it was unheard of - at least by me. Now with a lot of charity events being run by “for-profit professionals” and the cost of putting on some of these events with insurance and all, it is getting a lot more common.
One local group decided to do a charity walk with the usual mailings, t-shirts for participants, insurance, water along the course - all the standard stuff. Just get and collect pledges and register; no fee and you didn’t have to collect and turn in the money yourself. They finished in the red and the three (or four) families who “hosted” it ate the difference. Next event they tried had an initial fee at registration so at least costs were covered.
I did one of the first AIDS rides twenty years ago, and, if I remember correctly, the buy-in cost was around $2000. This was for a 6 day, 500 mile bike ride from Minneapolis to Chicago. So, no, not a new thing.
I no longer believe in that kind of fundraising/awareness raising. Too much money goes to the top. I also think church trips to poorer countries to build stuff is a terrible use of available funds.
Happens around here all the time- with a minor variation of “Here’s your quota of $100 worth of tickets- you have a month to sell them and turn in the money.” Of course, then you have the problem of people who return neither the money nor the ticket books and for all you know, they sold the tickets in the name of the non-profit and kept the money. Because as in my example, I’ve seen this in sports leagues, which typically have a lot of unknown new members each year.
That is how the big events work- the donations are collected before the event * (IME they are paid directly to the charity through a specified webpage for an individual participant or team although I suppose there is some mechanism to send cash or checks) and if you don’t raise the specified amount of funds you can either 1) agree to continue to raise funds for some period of time after the event and make up any shortfall that still exists or 2) Not participate in the event. I doubt very much that they send collections after you (it would be a PR nightmare) but I am sure you wouldn’t be permitted to participate again if you didn’t come up with the specified amount of money one way or another.
It’s not going to be necessary for every event. The one my cousin did involved walking 39 miles in Manhattan over 2 days. That means the event had to provide food , sleeping and showering facilities, transportation for those who couldn’t complete the walk, and most likely pay for a variety of city services-permits to close streets and use parks department facilities etc. It’s not going to be worthwhile to do all and allow people to participate with a hundred or two in donations. Most of those issues are not going to come up if you’re talking about a single day event involving people walking laps around a track.
- and on a slightly different note- the part I don’t understand is why these events big or small have changed from what they were when I was a kid. When I was a kid, you had walk-a-thons, bowl-a-thons, swim-a-thons, etc., where sponsors pledged a certain amount per lap, mile or pin and the amount of the donation depended on how many miles/laps were completed or pins were knocked down by the participant. There were other campaigns where people would just solicit donations from their friends and neighbors for a specific charity. Now, they seem to have morphed into a strange combination- if you donate a specified amount which is collected even before the event takes place and your donation doesn’t depend on the person finishing or even actually participating in the event (maybe they fell ill), I’m not sure why they even have the event. Are people really more willing to solicit donations and walk 39 miles than they are to solicit the same donations without walking?
How is it compulsory if you’re volunteering to participate?
And I remember how an investigation showed that most of the money raised (around 60-70%, as I recall) went to the professional fundraiser behind these events, with only a small part ever getting to the AIDS charities. Enough of a fuss that in later years these groups organized it themselves, without using a professional fundraiser. (And then he threatened to sue them, claiming he had copyrighted the name, idea, etc.)
I had never heard of this sort of thing. I just can’t imagine why you would participate= you put your arse in a sling to help out and then have to kick in if you don’t get enough sponsors?
I too am raising money for suicide victims. I can guarantee, in the manner of Father Ted, that the monies will only rest in my account until distributed to those claimants who can prove they have committed suicide.
Send money now !
I do a “midnight madness” walk on a yearly basis, to raise money for the families of dead fishermen. For that, I pay an entrance fee of £10 to cover the cost of running the event, and any money I raise goes 100% to the charity.
If your friend is interesting in supporting suicide/mental health, I would encourage him to look into http://namiwalks.org - I have participated in NAMI walks and did not have pay anything (or raise any funds) to participate.
One of my friends was trying to raise money for a Leukemia walk or something like that, and had to drop out of the event because all of us were not able to cough up enough money for him.
I found it very distasteful for the charity to do that. I think it makes more sense to encourage as many people as possible to participate, and then if people want to kick in money to get certain services during the vent then that’s great. However if you are going to kick out people for not making enough money for the charity, then that to me seems to indicate your charity doesn’t actually need our help and support all that badly. I’d rather support charities that are grateful for whatever help they can get rather than setting a high bar to participate.
I used to do Komen walks (back before I figured out the organization was not one I wanted to support, and with my sister, who is a survivor and I DID want to support) and there was a minimum for the walk, but it was REALLY low - like $25.
Years ago in college I worked for the American Lung Association on their bike rides, because those were expensive to put on there was a minimum buy in - you could pay it yourself or raise that minimum. But that was multiple vans and support staff, health care professionals, hotel rooms and food for a three day ride.
My kids regularly do the “buy the raffle tickets or sell them, we don’t care, but at the end it will cost you $20” events. Ours know to not even pick up the raffle tickets, we just write a check. This recently astounded my daughter’s theatre teacher, who had set up all sorts of fundraising events - and we wrote a check, did the fundraising events for other people, but wouldn’t sell anything (she’ll staff the concession stand for basketball and football games, but won’t sell raffle tickets).