On The Pegs September 2019 - Volume 4 - Issue 9 | Page 113

On The Pegs
Vol. 4 Issue 9 - September 2019
113
The Joys of Fundraising
Unless you are independently wealthy, it’s going to be a struggle to come up
with that kind of money out-of-pocket. That’s where fundraising kicks in. Person-
ally, I was usually able to raise enough money to cover about half of our costs of
going to the event. Here are some of the things we tried, some of which were
more successful than others.
1) T-Shirts: I still have ISDE 2012 fundraiser shirts sitting in the back of my closet.
The key here is to make sure you don’t end up ordering too many shirts. If you
do, it is entirely possible that you will actually lose money. With that being said,
t-shirts are a very popular fundraising option and do work well for most people.
2) Sponsorships: This won’t help you from a monetary standpoint, unless you
get a local business involved. But if you don’t already have gear sponsorships, or a
drink system, or need headlights or want spare parts, there are a lot of US-based
racing companies that are happy to help you out by sending some free product
to use at the event. Since I was only 16 when I went the first time, I hadn’t built
up any of the relationships I have with companies now. But calling or emailing a
company doesn’t cost you anything except a bit of your time. Your time may be
in short supply, but it’s still usually worth doing.
3) Spaghetti Dinners: The challenge with these is that if they are done for the
general public, you will have to explain the entire event to them, which can be
challenging if their only motorcycling experience is with the neighbor’s Harley.
Then you have the further challenge of explaining why they should support your
efforts. All of this must be done before the dinner if you hope to have people
show up. If you have a built-in network of non-riding people, like at a church,
community group or a school, you have a much better chance of making this a
success. It would probably work better to do a spaghetti dinner at a race (unless a
company or other rider beats you to it), though we never tried it ourselves.
4) Ride Days: This was by far my favorite type of fundraiser! It works especially
well here in the East where we don’t have vast public lands where you can ride
for cheap or free. All you need is to find a friendly landowner who will let you cut
some trail or even better, who already has some. I cannot thank the Sims family
enough for generously letting me use their property (the best single-track in In-