If you recall, Melanie Lidman will be riding her bike from Canada to Mexico as a fundraiser. Her journey is a great insight into the world of athletic giving.

-One of the most effective and easiest ways to raise money for your trip is through a website with online donations. There are two steps to this: creating a personal website or blog and creating a page for online donations. Building a website is free, easy and the best way to keep many people updated on your progress throughout the adventure. I personally like building a website/blog through Blogger (http://www.blogspot.com) because with their layouts, it’s ready in about five minutes and looks fairly professional. The website should be where you gather all of the information—bios of team members, your fundraising goals, a map of your progress, any fundraising events, and updates and photos from the trip. You can check out our website: http://teamgreenjello.blogspot.com. It still needs some work, but you can get the basic idea.

Creating a website where people can donate money to your cause is even easier than creating a blog. The best website is Firstgiving (http://firstgiving.org/), which has over 30,000 organizations to choose from. Even if your charity isn’t on their exhaustive list, it’s simple for your charity to sign up. Friends and family donate via credit card or PayPal to your personal page on the website, and Firstgiving handles everything, so you don’t need to deal with any money transfers or expenses. The only downside: they charge a 7.5 percent transaction fee, so not all of your money goes to the charity.

If you’re working with a slightly larger charity, contact their outreach organizer as one of your initial steps. They can let you know if the organization has their own fundraising technology they can set you up with that will allow them to bypass the higher transaction fee. For example, World Bicycle Relief uses Kintera, a similar service, and gets to keep more of the money. Our fundraising website is here: http://tinyurl.com/mpv3pg

After you have your blog and fundraising page up and running, make sure you get the word out. Send an e-mail, twitter, or relentless Facebook messages to everyone you know. The message I sent out is below:

Dear Family and Friends,
Hope this e-mail finds you happy and healthy. I am fresh back from a stint working as an intern at Outside Magazine in New Mexico, after finally graduating from UMD, and excited for my next adventure on the horizon. Along with my friends Jess and Brendan, I will be biking from Vancouver, British Colombia to San Diego. This is my first bike adventure – I’ve never done anything like it before – and I’m ecstatic to be putting off the job search for a few months while we roll down the coast (it is downhill the whole way, right? That’s how it looks on the map). In addition to some crazy adventures, we will be raising money for World Bicycle Relief, an organization dedicated to building bikes for aid workers and teachers in rural Africa and Asia. Rugged bikes built especially to carry heavy loads allow health workers to access remote villages in a quarter of the time and make a huge difference in the lives of everyone in the community.

We’ve set a goal of raising $3,000, enough to buy 25 bikes for a village. So far, through a basketball tournament and bar night, we’ve raised almost $1,000. I know times are fairly tough right now, but a donation of just $10 would really help us meet our goal of providing bikes for people who need it most. You can donate directly to World Bicycle Relief through our website: http://tinyurl.com/mpv3pg

We also have a blog so you can follow our exploits and progress down the coast:
http://teamgreenjello.blogspot.com

Thanks for your support… Drop me a line and let me know how you’re doing. I’m in Boston till July 1, our departure date, so if you’re around here give me a holler.

Love and bicycling,
Melanie

Before I sign off, I thought I’d share my first adventure: learning how to use a bike with clipless pedals (which should really be called clip-in pedals). With my bike, and most bikes used for racing and touring, my shoes have a cleat that attaches to the pedal so I get more power in each pedal stroke. Since this is my first bike not from Kmart, I had to learn the clipless pedals from scratch. I went to the only patch of grass in all of Santa Fe, confidently clicked my shoes onto the pedals… and fell over immediately. Then I realized what I should have thought of earlier: I don’t know how to unclip. Luckily my cell phone was within reach. “Jess… I’m clipped into my bike and I can’t get up….” [insert hysterical laughter here]. I’m not sure why I thought calling someone in Maryland would help my situation, but when you’re lying on your back with your feet attached to a bike in the middle of a park with everyone looking at you, well, you’re not thinking rationally.

After I finally righted myself, the New Mexico state police ambled over to let me know I could not ride my bike on the only patch of grass in all of Santa Fe, because, it was after all, the only patch of grass for miles around (which was why I chose it… to cushion my wipe outs!). After about 20 minutes and 40 bruises on the packed dirt, I got the hang of clip in/clip out enough to pedal off into the mountains. Things were going great, I was cruising along, bonking up yet another hill, and then BAM! Next thing I know I’m sprawled out on my back, still clipped to the bike of course, road rash up and down my left side, and a pick-up full of construction workers drives by, honking and hollering.

They later asked if I needed any help (it is the friendly Southwest, after all), but I mumbled an I’m fine, unclipped myself as gracefully as possible, got back on and pedaled off into the sunset (of course it was getting dark and I had no light). Summer adventure – off to a phenomenal start!

Tune in for the next post about planning fundraising events.