Charities Use Outdoor ‘Challenges’ to Attract Donations

Capitalizing on a surging interest in adventure travel and a booming market for activities that test physical fitness and endurance, a growing number of charities are adding events like whitewater rafting trips and mountain-climbing expeditions to their usual calendar of fund-raising auctions and dinners.

Charities organize and run the trips, or they pay tour operators to do so. In exchange, participants raise a specified amount of money, which covers the cost of the adventure plus a contribution to the cause.

Along with bringing in revenue, charity officials say the trips usually have other benefits, such as raising the organization’s profile.

At the American Lung Association, the annual cross-country bicycle ride is seen as a way to promote the organization’s message about healthy living.

Says Rusty Burwell, the lung association’s associate director for development: “We are clean-air people, we are health people. If we are getting people outdoors, exercising, we are promoting our message.”

American Lung Association

The American Lung Association did not raise as much money from its cross-country bicycle trip last summer as planners had hoped. About 730 riders raised an average of $8,300 each to make the 3,250-mile, 48-day trip, which started in Seattle and ended at the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital, as shown at left. But expenses ate away at much of the trip’s more than $6-million in revenue.

Rusty Burwell, a fund-raising official at the association, says costs accounted for nearly 70 per cent of income. But, he says, he expects costs to drop to 40 per cent of revenue for this summer’s trip, and to as little as 20 per cent in the years to come.

Last year’s high expenses, he says, were due to a lot of one-time costs, such as mapping the bike route and paying an outside company to run the event. Starting this year, the association is organizing the trip on its own.

“The trip is not that much more complicated than other events we do,” Mr. Burwell says. “It’s just a lot longer.”

The Breast Cancer Fund, in San Francisco, encourages people to climb mountains and run rapids not only to raise money, but also to increase awareness of the disease.

In addition to asking the women on last summer’s fund-sponsored climb of Alaska’s Mount McKinley to collect contributions — the climbers brought in an average of about $10,000 each — the organization also encouraged the women to speak to local groups about the expedition and to publicize the work of the fund, which, among other things, sponsors breast-cancer research.

Andrea R. Martin, the founder and executive director, says the fund will also earn invaluable exposure when a documentary film about the climb is broadcast on public television in the fall.

The Breast Cancer Fund’s outdoor-adventures program — called Step Ahead — is also intended to offer opportunities to breast-cancer survivors. Women who have had the disease are encouraged to participate in events like the one shown above: a whitewater rafting trip in Idaho.

Says Ms. Martin, a breast-cancer survivor herself who climbed the Argentine mountain Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, in 1995 with a group organized by the fund: “The challenges let us ‘walk our talk’ in terms of encouraging healthy life styles, practicing wellness, and fighting the odds.”

CARE, the international-relief organization based in Atlanta, last month sponsored its fourth annual Kilimanjaro Climb for CARE expedition. The charity sends participants who raise at least $10,000 — and who pay an additional $2,800 to cover costs — on a climb up Africa’s tallest mountain, Kilimanjaro.

In addition to scaling Kilimanjaro, participants visit the site of a CARE-sponsored project. After this year’s climb — which took place last week — participants were scheduled to travel to the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar to see a new preserve established to protect an endangered tropical forest. CARE is working with eight neighboring villages to start local conservation groups and to use revenue from the park to improve area schools, clinics, and roads.

On a past CARE climb, shown above, employees of the coffee retailer Starbucks — one of the charity’s corporate supporters — posed with a company flag at the top of Kilimanjaro.

Whizz-Kidz, a London charity that raises money to buy wheelchairs and other mobility aids for children, has run a successful marathon program since the charity began in 1990, sending participants to races in other cities, including New York. But officials say the program only whet the charity’s appetite for adventure. Last year, Whizz-Kidz broadened its travel opportunities to include treks in Nepal and Iceland, and a bicycle trip to the Taj Mahal, in India.

In order to go on a 10-day trip to Nepal, participants, like those shown above, must raise or pay $4,500, or roughly three times what it cost Whizz-Kidz to run the tour. Last year, the average amount raised per person was $6,100. This year, the organization hopes to raise $1.6-million, sending nearly 300 people on what it calls its Himalayan Challenge.