Running for Charity? – Make the most of your Marathon Sponsorship

In spite of the Royal Mail strike over 120,000 people will be looking out for the postman today in the hope he delivers them an acceptance magazine for the 2010 Virgin London Marathon.  Even if you were successful and don’t have to consider the golden bond option, for those of us with a ‘congratulations you are in’ magazine, there are still pages of charities wanting you to raise money for them.

I’ve never been a fan of Golden Bond places. Rather than the ballot entry fee of £30 the charities have to pay around £350 for a golden bond place which they have to recoup from the money you raise. If you feel passionate about raising money for a given charity, there are many big city marathons run around the same time as London you could enter for £30 or less, with more of your hard earned sponsorship money given to the charity directly.

If you desperately want to run London, there is no need to get your friends and family to pay for your impatience by thinking they are donating to charity, when really they are mainly just contributing towards your entry fee.  You will get a guaranteed place if you have been rejected 5 times and there is probably a good chance you would have got in through the ballot by that time. You could train harder and get a good for age time for next year. Or if you train extra hard and get a championship time by January 2010 you will still be able to race in April 2010

If you are a member of a running club, they have club places available. The regular competitive club runners will probably have their own places through either full or half marathon times, so if you want to run London for the first time, joining and becoming active in a club will probably lead to a club place offered to you next year.

If you have been lucky to get your own place in the 2010 VLM and want to fund raise for a charity then Virgin are now providing a more cost effective way to collect money. In the past most of us have had a JustGiving.com page for fund raising and it does have it’s benefits. Adding a link to your facebook page or sending out an email to friends you don’t see personally, is an easy way to encourage sponsorship and they collect gift aid for you. But they do this for a charge. A £10 donation can also reclaim £2.82 from the government as gift aid, yet JustGiving take 5% as a transaction fee (64p) plus VAT at 15% (10p) along with the credit card fee of 15p resulting in a whopping cost to the charity of 89p. Over 10 years £526m has been raised through JustGiving. Transaction fees of 5% would have earned them £26.3 million, that’s paying for some impressive overhead costs.

But with Virgin sponsoring the London marathon now they have set up Virgin Money Giving as a non profit making company to help you raise more money by only charging 2% as a transaction fee (card fees are the same) so the total cost to the charity is only 35p from a £10 donation.

Obviously the most effective way would be to get post dated cheques from your sponsors that you promise to cash only if you finish the race, ensure you get their permission to claim gift aid and then the charity gets to keep all 128% of your donated money. But if you are planning on a fund raising event and want on online sponsorship page for any event (it’s not limited only to VLM runners) then Virgin Money Giving (virginmoneygiving.com) could be the most effective way to collect your donations.

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