CHAPTER 7
Charity Case

Edward Norton was a movie star looking for some money.

Robert Wolfe and his brother Jeffrey had an idea how to get it. Shauna Robertson, a movie producer, put them all together. Like many before and after him, Norton was running the 2009 New York City Marathon for charity. Unlike those who joined a group like Team in Training or Fred’s Team, Norton had identified his own specific cause; a little-known environmental group in Africa called The Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust.

Norton has long been known for being at least slightly off the beaten Hollywood path, in terms of what he does for his work, and outside of it. His film choices are at times aggressively counterintuitive and seem meant to invite controversy—American History X, where he played a former neo-Nazi, and Fight Club, the hyperviolent adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel. More recently he was featured in two films nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award in 2015, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Birdman.

Norton could go what had become the traditional route—an email blast to a bunch of family and friends. But he figured there might be a better way.

Halfway across the country, in Detroit, the Wolfes had sold their stakes in an outdoor retailer called Moosejaw. Not even 40 years old, they’d decided the next company would be built around the idea that raising money for causes you’re passionate about should be fun. They thought a platform should exist for giving, the exact same way that LinkedIn is a platform for your professional life.

“Our goal was to change the world and have an impact,” Wolfe says. “How the hell do we figure out how to make giving back fun? We want to flip the model entirely so that charity is no longer boring, burdensome, or guilt-ridden.”

In the quest for a test case, Robert Wolfe called his long-time friend Robertson, then a movie producer at the peak of her game—her credits include The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, and Knocked Up.

Like the Wolfes, she was at something of a crossroads, asking big questions about what she wanted to do for a living. Wolfe described what he and his brother were working on. Robertson, who at the time was dating Norton (they’ve since gotten married), suggested he might use this new fund-raising platform for his New York/Maasai project.

Norton set a modest-for-a-movie-star goal of $75,000 and along with the Wolfes and Robertson, built a website. From the first moment, it looked and felt different. The site cajoled and good-naturedly bribed would-be donors with Norton-related prizes, including a signed American History X poster.

The final tally: $1.2 million. More than validated, the foursome created a company called CrowdRise to bring the platform to the famous and nonfamous alike. The basic idea is Kickstarter for charity, an easy way for anyone to raise money. The Kickstarter analogy is underscored by CrowdRise’s financial backers, led by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Wilson, the highest-profile New York-based venture capitalist, also invested in Kickstarter.

In 2014, CrowdRise raised $23 million for its own purposes, in an investment round led by Wilson, who said when the round was announced that he estimates the online charity market is worth at least $30 billion annually, with the potential to reach as much as $70 billion.1

CrowdRise already had won the financial backing of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and venture investor Chris Sacca for his seed round. Wilson assembled a powerful roster for the more recent infusion; Spark Capital, CAA Ventures, and Bezos Expeditions were among the new investors.

Here’s how it works: CrowdRise touts that a user can set up a fundraising page in exactly 21 seconds, for a race, or even to encourage people to donate to your favorite charity in honor of your birthday. There’s no time limit to what you’re doing and few other restrictions. CrowdRise, in the quest to capture and define a community of people, has what it says is the only loyalty program in giving. Users earn CrowdRise Impact Points, which lead to prominent placement for your cause on the website and can also be used to earn CrowdRise apparel, which isn’t for sale in any other way.

CrowdRise is a for-profit company. The business model is straightforward: CrowdRise charges a small processing fee, which donors can opt to cover themselves. They choose to do so at a high enough rate that the charity or beneficiary ultimately receives more than $98 out of every $100 raised, Wolfe says. It’s the official fundraising platform for the Boston Marathon, New York City Marathon, Ironman, and Tough Mudder.

While CrowdRise started with something of a top–down approach, and worked with the aforementioned partners to gather customers. By 2015, the company was shifting to marketing directly to gather new users. Wolfe directed a team to build an app designed to keep users connected with each other, encouraging more consistent engagement. CrowdRise leaned into the notion of being a club its members wanted to be a part of.

By virtue of its roots as a cool, word-of-mouth start-up (Wolfe told me during a February 2015 phone conversation that their first outbound salesperson started that day), CrowdRise users skew toward the young professional, Wolfe says, an image the company clearly cultivates.

As Barry’s Bootcamp grew on the strength of its celebrity clients, CrowdRise has gained a following from its own roster of famous people; Will Ferrell, Olivia Wilde, Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, and dozens of other A-listers have used CrowdRise to raise money for select causes.

And CrowdRise hasn’t been shy about leveraging those connections, drawing new, noncelebrity fund-raisers in, as well as rewarding donors with personalized swag from the famous like Norton’s personalized posters.

Perhaps owing to its celebrity-powered roots—and the particular famous people who’ve embraced it, the most distinct element of CrowdRise is its tone. The website is littered with winking asides, good-natured snark, and comments, questions, or movie quotes that slide right into the absurd. Wolfe says a staffer said a line from the movie Stepbrothers was “totally out of place.”

“I said, ‘That’s exactly the point,’” he says.

Wolfe says the off-kilter culture is imported directly from Moosejaw, the retailer he started at age 21, with no retail experience. By his description, the store sounds like something that exists only in a Shauna Robertson-produced script. “People would come into the store and I’d ask them if they wanted to play Home Run Derby in the parking lot,” Wolfe says. “I wasn’t trying to market to them. I just genuinely wanted to play Home Run Derby.” Customers who came in during March Madness would find themselves ignored because the staff was too busy watching the games on TV, Wolfe says.

Moosejaw, which sells outdoor apparel from brands like North Face and Patagonia, set the tone for what CrowdRise would become. (Even today, on the part of the Moosejaw site that sells its branded T-shirts, it says, “I’d buy these for my friend if he weren’t so imaginary.” It’s a short philosophical hop from there to CrowdRise’s tagline: “If you don’t give back, no one will like you.”)

Wolfe, in his provocatively friendly way, says it’s probably not the best way to run a company. Asked about his management and strategic vision, he demurs about the overarching grand plans for CrowdRise, noting that he prefers to be very much in the proverbial weeds. “Micromanaging is underrated, particularly when technology makes it so easy to stay really well-connected,” he says. “‘Flat’ organizations are cool and fun, and looking at what’s five feet in front of you, in addition to a year or two out, is often underrated.”

What’s in front of him is a massive segment of the new fitness economy, where technology, physicality, and meaning intersect. Charities are a gateway to the big live participatory athletic events, a fun way to get fit with your friends, a dose of altruism added for good measure. Tens of billions of dollars flow in and around all of these events, and ultimately into the hands of (hopefully) worthy causes.

Paul Schaye grew up in Boston, in a house that was steps from the Boston Marathon course. His life changed when he got a bicycle. “It was like getting the keys to the car,” he says. “On a bike you could go anywhere.”

He covered most of his native city by pedaling and soon anywhere became close to a reality. By high school, he was taking bike trips through Canada and Europe through the American Youth Hostel program, eventually leading his own ride in Nova Scotia. The nine cyclists carried everything on their bikes, camping every night along the way.

After college at University of Massachusetts–Amherst, Schaye moved to New York to start what began as a successful, if somewhat typical, career in consulting and finance. After working at PepsiCo and Booz Allen, he founded his own firm. Named for his Boston neighborhood, Chestnut Hill Partners works with private equity firms to find deals and recruit management teams.

We met in that context. While we talked frequently about private equity, we talked almost as much, if not more, about running, cycling, and triathlons. Every conversation or email included the question: “How’s your training?”

While cycling was and remains his main sport, he evolved into a triathlete after befriending Joe DiLorenzo, a founder of Tyr, a company that started in the swimwear business and went on to become a major outfitter for the modern triathlete. DiLorenzo in 2003 convinced Schaye to do the bike leg of a triathlon relay out in the Hamptons. The following year, Schaye opted to do the whole thing himself instead of relaying. He completed the Olympic distance triathlon and “was hooked,” he says.

What I didn’t know when I first met Paul in 2007 was that he was battling stage IV cancer. His particular strain was a rare gastrointestinal tumor that had spread to his liver.

We became friends as he staged a remarkable recovery. After multiple surgeries and complications, he returned to form, riding his bike or spinning, pausing only when he had to have a follow-up operation. Occasionally he’d ask for my advice about a fundraising note to send out to friends and contacts for endurance charities he supported.

Cycling was his gateway into charity, long before he got sick. He participated in the early Boston to New York AIDS Ride, a three-day trek that raised in excess of $7 million, as well as its predecessor, a seven-day ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles known originally as the California AIDS ride.2

Schaye also signed up for the Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC), a ride across Massachusetts that began in 1980 and bills itself raising more than any other athletic fundraising event in the United States. In 35 years, riders have raised $455 million for cancer research.

For Schaye, the PMC is the thing. He organized a group to ride with him—and when he was sick, without him—dubbed Paul’s Posse. The group includes his doctor, who specializes in the so-called orphan cancers that Schaye fought, and which struggle to win funding because of their rarity. In the past decade, the Posse has raised in excess of $2 million on its own.

Schaye, who carries himself with a calm confidence of a guy who stared down death and won, puts riding in context. “Let’s be honest, this is playtime,” he says. “But it’s not so egocentric—you’re running or riding for a greater purpose.”

Beyond the PMC, Schaye also supports Cycle for Survival, an indoor, spinning-based fundraising event that’s quickly become a juggernaut. Started in 2007 to raise money for rare cancer research at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, the one-day event by 2014 was held in 13 cities, with additional small satellite locations.

Cycle for Survival capitalizes on the fever around spinning. Equinox became a founding sponsor in 2009, and hosts the events each year. Through 2014, the charity had raised $51 million, making it one of the fastest-growing athletic fundraising events in the United States.

In the summer of 2014, Schaye committed to ride for part of the first day of the PMC, held in early August of that year. A couple days after the event, I got a brief, exuberant email with the subject line, “Mission FULLY Accomplished.” The body said simply, “We did it . . . All 112/90,” a reference to the miles logged each of the two days.

Schaye is a spiritual descendent of a movement that began almost 30 years ago, when Georgia Cleland had a 45 percent chance of making it to three years old. It was 1988, and she’d been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Her suburban New York parents were understandably distraught. Largely tapped out, they looked for new and different ways to pay for her treatment.

Her father, Bruce, was an avid runner. He decided to ask his friends for money in return for running that year’s New York City Marathon. He organized 38 runners who raised $322,000 and ended up creating the largest athletic fundraising organization in the process.

Today, Team in Training raises about $70 million annually. Bruce Cleland has handed off the day-to-day running to Georgia, now in her thirties, who ran her first half marathon in 2011. The chances of survival for Georgia’s same cancer today stand at 95 percent, according to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the main beneficiary of Team in Training.

It’s a juggernaut, pulling in $1.2 billion in donations since Bruce Cleland’s first ask in the late 1980s. Team in Training (TNT) meets both the criteria of its name, gathering dozens of like-minded people for a specific event. In return for raising money, TNT provides training programs, organized workouts, coaching, and mentoring. On race day, TNT team members wear distinctive purple gear; full-throated, dedicated cheering sections propel them through the racecourse.

Team in Training’s defining moment in the modern marathon era was the inaugural Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in 1998, where TNT became the exclusive national charity. The race, the largest-ever, first-time marathon, drew more than 19,000 people. Elite Racing CEO Tim Murphy, the Rock ‘n’ Roll creator, pushed TNT to bring more racers than it originally intended.

Charities typically guarantee a certain number of runners from its ranks by buying the bibs and then giving them to participants in return for raising a certain amount of money. Team in Training initially agreed to guarantee about 1,500 runners for the first Rock ‘n’ Roll. Knowing his ambitions for the race, Murphy pushed for more, said Tracy Sundlun, another Elite Racing executive and long-time running coach and race promoter.

Murphy also wanted to exploit Team in Training’s national reach and asked the charity to promote the race in each of its chapters. Given the high profile of the training teams, Murphy was counting on a word-of-mouth effect for his race. It worked all around.

With about 5,500 runners toeing the line (roughly 25 percent of the total field), Team in Training raised $15.6 million that year. In the first 10 years of the ongoing partnership, TNT runners in the San Diego race alone raised $125 million.3 “Team in Training changed the face of fundraising,” Sundlun says.

Training with a group like Team in Training provides a social architecture of encouragement and support, and racing for a cause sits at the center of the new fitness economy. It’s an athletic gateway drug, the means by which folks who never seriously considered themselves cut out for endurance sports manage to run a marathon, or complete a triathlon. Often a charity race introduces a participant into a world they want to continue to be a part of, even if they don’t raise money again.

Being on a team is appealing, satisfying a primal human need for belonging and encouragement. For an activity as daunting as running a marathon, standing alongside other newbies and supported by kind veterans provides a deep level of comfort.

Then there’s the cause itself, which provides a motivation for many, especially people like Bruce Cleland, who have someone very specific in mind.

I’d add a third, slightly more cynical, motivation. For some more experienced athletes, charity provides cover for what’s ultimately a selfish endeavor. A number of runners conceded this to me, asking not to be identified. One says, “It helps defray the being-away-from-the-family guilt.” Another puts it more bluntly: “When you’re riding your bike for five hours on a Saturday, it’s harder for anyone to argue with you when you say you’re helping cure cancer.”

Wolfe, for one, has little time for this theory, or at least a more optimistic twist. An avid runner—he ran, and raised money for the Maasai with Norton back in 2009—he says he’s never thought of charity as validating a selfish impulse, nor do any of his running buddies.

What he does see, in himself and in other CrowdRisers, is a desire to use charity as an excuse, and megaphone for touting your own fitness.

“When I ran 10 miles in the rain on a Tuesday night, I wanted to tell everyone about it,” Wolfe says. “The best excuse to tell your friends about your miserable training is to tie that into the fact that you’re raising money for charity.”

This is where the tagline—“If you don’t give back, no one will like you”—is both funny and true. “Everyone at the heart of it wants to be well-liked,” Wolfe says. “If raising money for charity can be something awesome that you tell the world about and your network praises you for it, and you feel great about it and that turns into a kick-ass cycle of people raising money over and over again for their causes…maybe we can change the world.” Wolfe’s team also amplifies the in-crowd cool through the merchandise that can only be earned by successful fund-raisers. It’s another manifestation of the get-the-joke tone of the company. The names of the merchandise on the site make sly reference to obscure movie characters, like Ari and Uzi in The Royal Tenenbaums.

With gear you can’t just buy, but have to earn, CrowdRise is playing an angle familiar to amateur weekend athletes everywhere, folks who can generally afford to buy any T-shirt or jacket that strikes their fancy. Having something that effectively can’t be bought has that extra, incalculable value that only comes from feeling cool.

CrowdRise stands as both an amplifier and disruptor of a booming industry of raising money through races. For a decade or more, it’s taken the form of a gentle, good-natured spam of sorts—the emails that land in most of our email boxes every week, asking for a contribution tied to completing a run, bike ride, or triathlon. The list of charities attached to endurance events is ever-growing: Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, American Heart Association, Susan G. Komen, Fred’s Team, Livestrong.

The numbers are big. The American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life series raised $335 million in 2014, giving it the top spot in the annual Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Top 30, which tracks events geared toward raising money.4 For context, the thirtieth-biggest event—American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Out of the Darkness Community Walks series—pulled in $12.5 million.

The list is a fascinating look into what’s appealing to both participants and givers and the moves within the rankings point toward what’s waxing and waning. To wit—and this signals a different kind of endurance that has nothing to do with running, walking, or riding—a new entry to the 2013 list was Movember. That’s the increasingly popular gimmick of growing a mustache during the month of November in exchange for charitable contributions. The 2014 take for those confident enough to sport a hairy lip for a few weeks: a robust $23 million, placing it twenty-second on the Peer-to-Peer list.

To understand the mechanics of the list—and the role of giving in the world of endurance sports—I went to the source. The annual ranking is the brainchild of David Hessekiel, an erstwhile journalist who in the late 1990s pivoted from publishing to the world of advising people on how to most efficiently do good.

He started the Cause Marketing Forum, a firm that advises and convenes companies around how to structure their charitable work, in 2002. More recently, in 2007, he created what was originally known as the Run Walk Ride Fundraising Council. In 2014, the group officially changed its name to the Peer-to-Peer Forum, a nod to the changing nature of giving (including events like obstacle racing and moustache growing).

Hessekiel met me one morning near his home office in Rye, New York. He was nursing a recently operated-on knee, promising a friend who sat down nearby that he’d be back on the tennis court soon. He carries the confident air of a convener: a centerpiece for both Cause Marketing and Peer-to-Peer is an annual conference where practitioners gather to dig into the latest and greatest approaches.

From our table in the tony Westchester suburb, he notes that a number of notable nonprofits in the middle of the event space are headquartered in the northern New York suburbs and southeast Connecticut, presumably owing in part to New York City’s place in the broader financial landscape and the money generated a few miles away in Manhattan. Team in Training’s office in White Plains is next door to the March of Dimes.

Hessekiel obviously has thought a lot about what motivates people to give through these sorts of charities, and he himself ran his first marathon back in 1997 for charity. His late father died of pancreatic cancer then and Hessekiel ran with Team in Training, which by that time was the go-to run-a-marathon-for-charity organization.

His own work shows how different the landscape is. Team in Training remains a dominant endurance charity, with $58.5 million raised through its participants in 2014, putting it eleventh on the Peer-to-Peer list. But that number pales with what Team in Training once garnered. As recently as 2010, Team in Training pulled in more than $97 million, putting it fourth on the list. At its height, Hessekiel told me, it raised $120 million in a year.

What happened? It appears that the pie isn’t keeping up with the number of organizations clamoring for our charitable dollars. “It’s getting diffuse,” Hessekiel says. Were he to participate to honor his father’s memory now, there’d likely be a way to direct the money he raised directly to pancreatic cancer research, rather than leukemia and lymphoma, which Team in Training supports.

It’s also easier to raise money, he says. The infrastructure and personnel necessary for a group like Team in Training even a decade ago simply aren’t necessary to support would-be individual fund-raisers. Technology has made it absurdly simple either for more local or specific charities to engage an audience. “Some things that used to seem like insurmountable tasks just aren’t,” Hessekiel says, evoking a variation of Wolfe’s brag-about-my-run email. “Now it’s 3 a.m. and I can set up a fund-raising page for a race, because I miss my dad. It doesn’t involve writing letters to everyone you know, or walking around the neighborhood, asking for money door-to-door.”

While endurance sport charities like Team in Training stress the team part of it, if it’s just about raising money for a race, there are other, more individual ways to accomplish the same goal. CrowdRise and its ilk have in many cases eliminated or diminished the need for a middleman, or at least changed what that middleman looks like.

As Norton’s experience in New York shows, the big races are still where much of the charity work takes place, even if the money is raised on an individual basis. Charities large and small feed off the energy inherent in the crowds of participants and spectators. Racers raising money for charity flout their associations, turning themselves into moving billboards for good causes.

Some of the world’s largest races caught onto charity early and used the notion of giving to swell their ranks. The connection between raising money at the largest marathons in a methodical, organized way is generally attributed to the London Marathon.

The London Marathon bills itself as the largest fundraising event on the planet (in 2007, its haul of 46.5 million pounds put it in the Guinness Book of World Records). The race has facilitated in excess of 600 million pounds ($1 billion) of giving since the first charity was included in 1984 (the race itself started three years earlier). The charity component started modestly, with the Sports Aid Foundation granting some entries as a way to help raise money. By 2014, roughly three-quarters of the more than 35,000 runners agreed to raise money for a cause and the race—now known as the Virgin Money London Marathon—has roughly 750 charities that benefit.5

Much of that happens through a two-decade-old program called the Golden Bond, whereby charities buy five places in the race every year for 300 pounds each, and then give them to runners who agree to raise a four-figure sum. According to the marathon’s website, there’s a waiting list for the Golden Bond. There’s a related program, called the Silver Bond, which guarantees a place every five years. About 15,000 spots are set aside for charity runners.

While it came later to the United States, the American races, too, became major annual fundraising anchors. In the six years ending in 2013, the New York City Marathon saw its number of charities jump to 324 and the number of runners tied to charities double.6

Part of the charity appeal is the experience. Like London, New York and Boston—the two most prestigious races of that distance in the United States—use charity as a way to get in, and one that comes with perks in addition to the whole helping other people thing.

Both races are difficult to get into, for different reasons. New York has for more than 15 years resorted to a lottery to admit the vast majority of its field. (A handful of elite runners are invited, others receive a guaranteed entry by posting a fast qualifying time or a combination of completing nine other New York Road Runners races and volunteering at another.) In the 2014 lottery, 77,087 people entered and 9,170 received numbers, about a 12 percent success rate.7

For the charity runners, race day is filled with VIP perks. Dedicated private buses whoosh past the official race transport for the rest of the field, depositing the charity runners at dedicated tents (usually with the far more important dedicated Porta Potties cordoned off for their exclusive use). After the race, another members-only tent awaits, this one for a post-race party where runners can greet their family and friends for a more civilized round of congratulations and refreshments.

Runners for charity teams also wear special, team-provided tops that make them easier to pick out by the dedicated fans in the dedicated cheer zones. Anyone who’s run a distance race knows that someone—anyone—shouting your name or affiliation can provide an enormous boost, especially in the later miles.

This social and support element—on race day and through training—is a critical component to charity’s appeal within the endurance sports equation. For almost everyone, completing a marathon or triathlon is difficult and the infrastructure is impressive and attractive. As Team in Training says on its website: “It’s like having a personal trainer plus the companionship and support of a team.”8

While people get hooked on the activities by raising money the first time, there’s evidence that they don’t keep shaking the virtual cup, opting in subsequent races to pay their own way rather than securing a spot through donations. Ahead of the 2013 New York Marathon, New York Road Runners conceded that its charity numbers were down significantly, even as the race took people in through the lottery system.9

Charity runners aren’t created equal, consultant David Hessekiel says. In his estimation, they fall into two distinct buckets. The first group is passion-driven. They’re people like Bruce Cleland who are racing and raising money for very personal reasons, like a sick child, spouse, or friend. They’ll get in touch with every single person they can think of and make a strong, personal pitch. Often, they’ll blow right past their goal.

The second group is driven by a different kind of personal reason. They want the experience of a certain race. For the Boston Marathon, entry requires meeting stringent qualifying standards. The average American male marathoner is 40.2 years old and the median finishing time in 2013 was 4:16, according to Running USA. The Boston qualifying time for that age cohort is 3:15 or below. For women, the average age was 36.6, and median finish was 4:41. Her qualifying time for Boston is 3:40. In short, to run Boston, you need to run a full hour faster than most people.

Beyond knowing someone who can get you in, the only other way to the starting line is to raise money, and like New York, Boston has used its iconic status to encourage people to raise money in order to run the storied route from Hopkinton to Boylston Street. Boston runners in 2014 raised a record $38.4 million, largely around the heightened awareness after the 2013 bombing. The previous year’s total was $20 million.

As with the Boston tragedy, there are factors that are difficult to quantify or predict that drive giving. Celebrity is another intangible yet potent force (Edward Norton’s success in raising money for the Maasai came in part because he’s a famous actor).

Nowhere was celebrity more powerful than the case of Livestrong, the uber-charity created around the cult of Lance Armstrong, the once-worshipped and subsequently disgraced cyclist who used his triumph over testicular cancer to create one of the most powerful athletic-oriented charities in history.

Setting aside for a moment the drama around Armstrong’s ultimate admission that he created a dizzyingly complex scheme to use banned substances to compete in and win a record number of Tour de France competitions, his contribution to the charity landscape is hard to dismiss.

First, Armstrong’s willingness to talk openly and fiercely about his own struggles helped remove long-standing stigmas around cancer, probably permanently. Coupled with other charity efforts like the Susan G. Komen breast cancer initiatives, cancer treatments—and cancer victims and survivors—were more comfortable talking publicly about their own experiences.

It was also an effective way—intentionally or unintentionally—to elevate the Armstrong brand. As detailed in Juliet Macur’s book, Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong, by surviving cancer and talking about it, Armstrong “could very well transcend the provincial roots of the sport.”10 His personal narrative elevated cycling into a different realm, especially in the United States, where the sport lacked the visibility and fan base it had in Europe.

A huge part of that visibility came from the cancer narrative, which Armstrong and his team leveraged into a hugely powerful organization to raise money for cancer research and provide support for cancer patients for whom Armstrong regularly took a personal interest.

And then there was the yellow wristband, which was brilliant in its simplicity as an outward symbol of survival and/or support, as well for its sales and marketing. For a measly dollar, you became a visible supporter of a good cause.

Nike began producing the bracelet in 2004, as Armstrong prepared to pursue his sixth Tour de France victory. The rubber bracelet concept originally was designed for basketball players, who could wear them on the court without them interfering with their game, noted Chris Brewer, of the Livestrong Foundation, in a taped interview for a website called Facing Cancer Together. The color was yellow, to evoke the leader’s jersey in the Tour. Nike produced 5 million bracelets, which felt like a big number, Brewer said. “We thought we could maybe sell 500,000 of them,” he said. “We were trying to figure out where we were going to store 4.5 million wristbands.”11

More than 80 million ultimately were sold, until Nike discontinued them in 2013, along with the rest of the Livestrong line, which included a range of apparel.

Anecdotally, for those of us who have participated in a number of races, charity seems like a major force, a dramatic accelerant for participation in endurance sports. At least one expert knocked that theory down a peg.

Jeff Shuck is an affable Indianan whose job is to help other people raise money. His firm, called Plenty, works with nonprofits and for-profits looking for a sophisticated approach to convincing people to give. He’s organized or been a part of hundreds, probably thousands, of events. After we speak on the phone, he sends me a white paper his firm produced on why people give money.

The athletic piece sits in the middle of the list and he notes that endurance events are effective to a point. But he pushed back on the notion that charity was a huge feeder.

Charity acts a gateway for some, and something of an excuse to others. As already mentioned on the positive side, it effectively cajoles some people who might otherwise never run a half marathon or marathon or complete a triathlon, to get out and do it. It can jumpstart a latent desire to be healthier and fitter, triggering all the mental and physiological benefits discussed in previous chapters.

“The idea of a walkathon has been around for generations,” Shuck says. He traces it back to 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt oversaw the creation of the March of Dimes as a new way to raise money for the newly formed National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

As with many charity founders who came before and after, Roosevelt’s own history informed his charitable interest. His personal struggles with polio prompted him to form an organization that would help fund research. That work led to a vaccine that effectively eradicated the disease.

The notion of actually marching wasn’t the original intent. The phrase was coined in 1938 by an entertainer of the time named Eddie Cantor and was a pun meant to reference a popular newsreel—The March of Time. Cantor’s innovation was to make the appeal wide using the most popular medium of the time: radio. He saw a radio-based appeal work to raise money for flood relief, and convinced radio producers to run 30-second spots for his March of Dimes campaign.

In another move that would be replicated for decades to come, he enlisted the help of other entertainers, like Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, and Kate Smith. The radio spots asked adults and children alike to send a dime, or whatever they could spare, directly to the White House. There was a time peg, as well. By 1934, annual Birthday Ball fund-raisers were held on FDR’s birthday, January 30th, to raise money for polio research. The march in 1938 was to lead up to that year’s balls.

By January 29 of that year, $268,000 in donations (mostly in dimes) arrived at the White House, many in envelopes from kids wanting to help other children with polio. That’s roughly $4.3 million in today’s dollars. The president took to the radio to thank the American public for its generosity, out of a sense of efficiency: “Literally, by the countless thousands, they are pouring in, and I have figured that if the White House staff and I were to work on nothing else for two or three months to come we could not possibly thank the donors,” he said.12

More than four decades later, and after polio had been effectively cured, the March of Dimes took on a more literal meaning. In 1970, the first walkathon took place in San Antonio to benefit the March of Dimes. First called WalkAmerica and now known as the March for Babies, the program has blossomed into more than 900 annual events and has raised in excess of $2 billion.13

The more recent progenitors were walks that started in the 1980s and 1990s to support causes like AIDS and cancer research. Walks were appealing because almost anyone could do it. Research of late shows that those very simple events, far less demanding than a triathlon or marathon, are increasingly appealing. “It’s not a test of wills, it’s a walk,” Shuck says.

From a business perspective, the future of charities fueling endurance participation seems robust, if diversified. The ever-growing number of specialized events indicates that the days of a dominant charity like March of Dimes or Team in Training is likely over.

Sports-driven charities find themselves competing not just with one another, but with for-profit companies infringing on an area once dominated by nonprofits. One interesting negative force on charity is big Wall Street money. With more and more private equity flowing to events, it becomes more difficult—and expensive—to make your race distinct, Shuck says. That’s because private companies can and usually do spend more to make more. As long as they can increase the bottom line, or justify increased cost with higher revenue at a related event, they’ll spend it.

That’s not the case with a charity event, which has to be cautious about every dollar, always mindful about how much of each dollar goes to overhead and production versus the charitable cause. While some will still gravitate to events for their pure motives, many more people will head for the sexier, more fun events—the ones with awesome goodie bags and cool post-race parties and bands along the course. Raising money by doing something physical to earn it is far from a radically new concept, Shuck says.

With the process of raising money being as simple as ever, thanks to the Internet and platforms like CrowdRise, and people like Paul Schaye able to marshal millions of dollars from friends, family, and contacts, and Millennials increasingly focused on doing well by doing good, we may be seeing our physical and charitable worlds begin to collide.

Robert Wolfe says his company, and the underlying notion of charity as something fun worth sharing, got a boost from an unlikely source in mid-2014: The Ice Bucket Challenge. As the notion of standing and getting a bucket of ice dumped on your head caromed around the social media universe, it not only raised record amounts of money for the ALS Association (more than $100 million in 30 days), it also helped change—Wolfe says permanently—the perception of charity as a bleak chore.

“There is no cause more serious than ALS,” he says. “My guess is that if someone went to ALS, or any cause for that matter, and said ‘We’re going to drive awareness and raise money by dumping ice on our head’ the reply would have been that it’s the dumbest idea ever. But, people want to have fun. And, if you can make it fun then it can resonate. My guess is that millions of people know a lot more about ALS than they did two years ago, and that’s pretty great.”

The Ice Bucket Challenge’s success further validates the notion that the best and most effective charities blend the virtual and the live, by leveraging the absurd speed and reach of the Internet into a very real experience. What’s more physical than getting ice dumped on your head?

As the physical amplifies the virtual, and vice versa, the result is activities that form a bigger portion of one’s daily existence—something to talk and tweet about, and something you actually do. Wolfe’s CrowdRise is another manifestation of what Chip Wilson managed to make of Lululemon, which became not just something to wear, but a reflection of who you are.

“It’s a part of your life, not an addition to your life. I like baseball and oranges and I raised a thousand dollars for Stand up for Cancer,” Wolfe says.

Notes

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