I have been meaning to write this blog for two days now, but luckily we have been too busy with the kick-off of our crowdfunding campaign! I wanted to give you all a little more insight into why we are doing the crowdfunding and all the work that goes into something like this. First, I am very proud to announce that we have made the front page of Indiegogo as a trending campaign. Out of the thousands of campaigns currently running we are in the top few today!
| But that certainly wasn't by accident, hundreds of hours and a lot of help has gone into making this happen. First, I hired a 'virtual assistant', since I still have another full time job with the military, to help me get more done in less time. I totally lucked out and found Pratima, a US attorney living in Switzerland, to help out. She knew nothing about crowdfunding (just like me) but we read everything we could get our hands on. Together we took all the advise we had read and put together the page you see today. This page took over 2 months to get to the finished product. At the same time, we started to get feedback from a small group of people on our page and giving some media outlets a 'sneak peek' at what we were doing. Our goal was to have a big opening week and hope that it caught on with a wider audience. Thanks to my friends and family, our sponsors, our charity, and a lot of strangers it looks like it is catching on! |  |
I have been doing several interviews the past few days and the question always comes up, why hasn't anyone done this before? I don't know the answer to that question, but I can tell you why I did it. From the video, and the page, you know how this campaign protects me from having to risk too much money, but it doesn't really go into how it protects the runners. Take a read of these two articles that highlight some unacceptable practices by dishonest race directors in the past few years.
I think I can speak for every honest race director when I say (cover the kid's ears) that people like this really piss me off! Race directors like that make it very difficult for anyone to put on a first year race, since the few bad apples get in the headlines and erodes the public's trust. Meanwhile, the 99.9% of honest race directors work their tails off and take home very little, if any, pay.
So our race has attempted to give runners confidence by ensuring all our race bills are paid BEFORE we start taking your money, and we use this blog to be as transparent as possible in what we do. I hope this helps and thank you for your support of our Indiegogo campaign.
So our race has attempted to give runners confidence by ensuring all our race bills are paid BEFORE we start taking your money, and we use this blog to be as transparent as possible in what we do. I hope this helps and thank you for your support of our Indiegogo campaign.
