Riding for Roses

Spencer and I have been working seriously on fundraising for the Ride for the Roses for 66 days of our 100 day plan. It’s time for a status report. You can donate to support cancer survivors and Spencer’s Ride for the Roses. Spencer’s motivation is that he wants to beat my fundraising from last year, take me to the Peloton Appreciation Dinner (even though last year I took his Mom and left him home just starting to show the symptoms of his leukemia), celebrate his one year diagnosis anniversary (October 22, 2005 – the Kids’ Day and Health Expo – will be Spencer’s one year leukemia diagnosis anniversary), and meet Lance Armstrong. The minimum to achieve Spencer’s goal is $15,000, though he really would like to get the yellow jersey level of $25,000. As of the time I hit the Publish button for this post, Spencer has raised $11,242.88. My motivation is that I want to support cancer survivors, and Spencer asked me to help him when we were in the hospital right after he was diagnosed with leukemia.

How are we doing? On the $15,000 plan I made when we started Kicking it up a notch we are where we need to be on August 4 – one week ahead of schedule. For the stretch $25,000 goal, we are where we needed to be on July 4. The stretch goal is looking a little tough, but we do have one or two tricks left in our bag.

Speaking of bags, a friend accused me of sandbagging. Just because I happen to know about $1500 in the mail that hasn’t been processed and have just mailed checks and credit card donations totaling over $2000, he claims I’m holding back on the counts. Not true. When we made the plan, we decided to count only money that the LAF had already counted. Their site says $11,242.88, so that’s the official tally. The stuff in the mail is in the mail and not yet counted. Besides, I need the reserves to make a shot at the $25,000 goal.

So far, I’ve approached about half of my address book by email. We’ve mailed about half of the people on our normal holiday greeting card (which we completly failed to send last year, so we are including an update as well as the fundraising pitch). We’ve run three reasonably successful events: a National Cancer Survivors Day at our church, Tour Watch 2005 throughout the Tour de France, and a raffle at It’s a Grind our favorite coffee shop. We started working the “tell a friend” option by emailing out to people who have donated and asking them to tell their friends. That has been very successful.

We have a couple more things left in our bag of tricks. We have a back to school event we’re trying to get involved in. We have a number of friends who we haven’t approached. I have the “long shot” list of people who have a less than 1% chance of giving, but might give big if they do. We have not yet talked to our neighbors about giving. We’ll start doing that when Spencer’s immune system is back.

Spencer is the key to all of this. I do planning. I do coordinating. I write the newsletters and the emails, but it is Spencer’s story and his personality that win people’s hearts and get them to donate.