Raising up some funds

OK, crew, the Big Climb is less than two weeks away, so it’s about time to step up (ha) our fundraising efforts. It’s not required that you solicit donations in order to participate, but the reason they bother to put this thing on in the first place is to raise money for leukemia research, so let’s see what we can do as a team. Here's some info to help get you started.

Where folks can donate

Your friends, family, coworkers, networking buddies, and casual acquantainces all can earmark their pledges specifically to support your effort. They do so by making a donation from your personal page. (You can find the URL for it by selecting your name from the drop-down menu at the top of this page: http://www.active.com/donate/2008bigclimb/CFES.) Any donations specified for you also get rolled up into the team total.

Soliciting pledges

E-mail works great for asking for support from your friends and family, since you can send the link to the page where they can make an easy online donation (on credit card, even!). Mention that you’re doing this with a team of people from your favorite gym and give some background on the event.

The letter I’m drafting looks like this. Feel free to use/revise any parts of it for your own:

"Hi folks,

CrossFit Eastside has now been around long enough now to be having a second annual go at the Big Climb for Leukemia on Sunday, March 18. We have a team of folks committing to climb the stairwells of Washington state’s tallest skyscraper (that’s 69 flights of stairs, 1,311 total steps, and 788 feet of vertical elevation), all to raise funds to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's mission of working toward a cure for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, and myeloma.

Last year our team of eleven dedicated folks completed the challenge. We placed 11th overall (out of 85), and we raised over $1800 for blood cancer research. This year, the CFES community has expanded significantly, and our buddies at Rainier CrossFit, CrossFit Westside, and CrossFit Mt. Baker will be participating as well, so we expect to do collectively even better.

Toward that end, if you’d like to support the cause, any amount you can contribute helps. It’s easy to pledge online:

http://www.active.com/donate/2008bigclimb/Carrie

-or-

htthttp://www.active.com/donate/2008bigclimb/CFES.

Much appreciated. Results and photos will be posted to www.crossfiteastside.com after the event.

Thank you!"

Corporate matching

Lots of companies—for example, Bill’s little software outfit up the hill that many of you spend too much time at—match employee donations to charitable causes such as this one. If you or your coworkers donate, you can typically double the amount of money that goes to the cause by submitting a matching request.

If you happen to work at Microsoft, here’s the process in more detail:

More tips

Fundraising tips from the Big Climb organizers are at http://lls.org/all_page.adp?item_id=218688.

posted by Carrie @ 11:58 PM Comments: 0