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Information about navigating and using the MS Challenge Blog and other online tools.

 

Fundraising Tip #15: Promoting your fundraiser on the event calendar

Written by Ken on August 18, 2010 at 2:38 pm

Some folks rely solely on solicitation letters for their fundraising. Others — especially teams — complement this approach by hosting a variety of events, from dinner parties to yard sales to bowlathons. But no matter how creative the occasion and passionate its hosts, fundraisers need promotion to attract a potential donors. So what's the easiest way to promote your event?

Why, by letting us do it for you, of course!

Event calendarNo doubt you've seen many fundraisers listed on this site over the summer. The next month continues to be filled with such opportunities. A quick look at the calendar shows a baseball game in Dracut and a clambake in Denver this Saturday; a restaurant outing and a training walk on Sunday; a dinner in Portsmouth on Tuesday; a pottery-painting party next Wednesday; and a baseball game and a training walk next Sunday. Phew! Many of you are intent on those last-minute fundraisers, apparently!

It's not too late to be included on this list — just fill out this online form with your event details. This will put the event on this blog's homepage, where it'll be seen by hundreds of people and emailed to more; put it on our Facebook page, where it will show up in our hundreds of fans' news feeds; and even get it tweeted, where Boston-area event calendars might see it.

There are a few caveats: the event calendar is not well-suited for recurring events (eg, something that happens every Tuesday) or events that have no specific time or place (such as an online sale). But submit these events anyway, and we'll work with you to find ways to publicize it.

Getting others to promote your event for you is more tactful than your own blatant plugs, but it's worth doing both. If you're on Facebook, post your Challenge Blog event listing to your own Facebook profile and invite your friends to come.

May all your fundraisers be the successes they deserve!

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Ken, a Worcester resident, joined the MS Challenge Walk in 2005, more than a decade after his mother was diagnosed. After walking for three years and 150 miles, he switched to the support crew and now rides his bicycle along the trail, providing whatever encouragement (and snacks!) he can to the 600 walkers. He is also on the event's steering committee and is this site's webmaster.

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Using your Participant Center to enter offline gifts

Written by Kara on July 16, 2010 at 10:02 am

Do you have checks from donors that you would like to instantly show in your fundraising total on your Participant Center? Instead of waiting until after you send in your donations to the National MS Society (donation processing is currently taking up to three weeks), you can enter in these gifts as offline donations. Using this method, you and your donors see their name scrolling on your page and the updated total of your fundraising without waiting.

To enter offline donations, just follow these instructions:

  1. Log into your Participant Center.
  2. At the top of your Participant Center, click on the "My Progress" button.
  3. When the page appears, look to the "Gift Summary" box.
  4. Click on the link "Enter gifts received offline".
  5. The page that will appear will be a form for the information of the check holder/donor. Fill out this form, indicating how the payment was made and for what amount and how they would like their name displayed on the "Fundraising Honor Roll".
  6. The donation is now listed in your fundraising as type "Offline (Unconfirmed)".
  7. You can then send them to our P.O. Box address (with the proper paperwork), and they will be confirmed by our data entry department.

We have created a visual demonstration of these instructions on YouTube:

For more details, see our offline gift guidelines. If you have any other questions about entering offline donations or logging into your Participant Center, please feel free to contact the MS Challenge Walk Team.

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Kara is the Development Coordinator for the Greater New England Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

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Fundraising Tip #9: Using online tools

Written by Ken on July 7, 2010 at 11:01 am

The MS Challenge Walk is an annual event that gives us the sense of community we need to do what we do all year round. The rest of the year, it's difficult, if not impossible, for us to get together in person. That's why online communications, such as this blog and our Facebook page, are such wonderful opportunities to complement, not substitute, that vital face-to-face interaction. Those same venues can be used to help you meet your goal of a world free from MS.

Boundless FundraisingIf you belong to Facebook, then you can enhance your profile by displaying your fundraising progress and reminding friends how to donate. See our instructions on how to use Boundless Fundraising.

If you prefer the one-to-one communication of personal email, there's a way to make that work to your advantage, too. By adding a brief reminder of your goal to the end of every email, your friends and family will find it convenient to click to your participant center and donate online. Learn how to add an email signature.

Want to make it easy to tell people how to donate online? Don't send them a really long Web address that's hard to remember. Create your own personalized shortcut.

Finally, if you are holding or organizing a fundraising event, be sure to publicize it! Add it to our event calendar, and we'll make sure all of this blog's readers and all our Facebook fans know about it.

What other online tools are you using to fundraise for the MS Challenge Walk? What online resources can we provide you to help you meet your goal?

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Ken, a Worcester resident, joined the MS Challenge Walk in 2005, more than a decade after his mother was diagnosed. After walking for three years and 150 miles, he switched to the support crew and now rides his bicycle along the trail, providing whatever encouragement (and snacks!) he can to the 600 walkers. He is also on the event's steering committee and is this site's webmaster.

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Share your stories on the Challenge Blog message board

Written by Ken on May 24, 2010 at 10:47 am

It's been said that "multiple sclerosis is a terrible way to meet wonderful people." And it's true: although few of us would wish this condition on anyone, it nonetheless brings us together to share a common goal, inspire each other to greatness, and become the best of friends.

Although the Challenge Walk is the best opportunity to engage in that team spirit, the Internet brings us ways to keep in touch year-round. Today, I'd like to introduce you to a new way to meet your fellow walkers online.

This blog now sports a message board where anyone can post their thoughts. Whether it's fundraising, team-building, training, or gear, you can write about whatever topics YOU want to talk about. You can answer other people's questions, comment on their stories, and share your own. It's completely up to you whether you want to quietly read or jump in with your own messages.

Chances are you already have an account on another service, be it Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, Twitter, AOL, or others. Don't worry — the Challenge Blog forum isn't yet another site for you to sign up for! You can log in with the same username you use on those other sites. Once you do, you can even be automatically emailed anytime a conversation you've participated in receives a reply. No more having to remember to check back to see if anyone's responded to your question — now you won't miss a thing! If you want to see every message posted to the forum, you can also sign up for email alerts.

Visit our new message board today and introduce yourself! If you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns, please let us know.

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Ken, a Worcester resident, joined the MS Challenge Walk in 2005, more than a decade after his mother was diagnosed. After walking for three years and 150 miles, he switched to the support crew and now rides his bicycle along the trail, providing whatever encouragement (and snacks!) he can to the 600 walkers. He is also on the event's steering committee and is this site's webmaster.

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MS Challenge Walk 2009 captured in video

Written by Ken on May 10, 2010 at 11:31 am

The MS Challenge Walk is an annual event that must be experienced to be appreciated. But some glimpse of the magical moments that constitute our weekend on the Cape was preserved in 2009 by Brenda Neary, Marsha Harris, and Mary Esper of Red Dirt Productions. From the opening ceremony to the closing parade, their cameras recorded our fundraising efforts in a series of videos that have since aired on Comcast Video on Demand and are now available on YouTube and Facebook.

These videos are not only great remembrances but also excellent promotional tools. The walk can be so hard to describe that sending these videos to your friends and family will help them see the people and places behind your words. Whether you're recruiting teammates or soliciting funds, this multimedia can help you get your message across, whether it be in 30 seconds, three minutes, or 19 minutes.



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Ken, a Worcester resident, joined the MS Challenge Walk in 2005, more than a decade after his mother was diagnosed. After walking for three years and 150 miles, he switched to the support crew and now rides his bicycle along the trail, providing whatever encouragement (and snacks!) he can to the 600 walkers. He is also on the event's steering committee and is this site's webmaster.

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MS Challenge Walk's new home on Facebook

Written by Ken on April 13, 2010 at 9:37 am

Last year, we announced that the MS Challenge Walk could be found on Facebook. Our thanks to everyone who joined us in that community! We enjoyed using that service to help each other prepare for this annual event and to get to know each other both before and after that amazing weekend.

Today we invite you to join us at our new Facebook home. We're moving from a "group" to a "page", a format change that brings with it many benefits:

  • Updates from the MS Challenge Walk can appear on your homepage in the news feed, making it easier to get the latest updates.
  • Photos from the event are now separated into albums, instead of being heaped them into one disorganized collection.
  • You can find our blog and Twitter feeds all in one place!
  • The page's address is much easier to remember:

http://www.facebook.com/MSChallengeWalkCapeCod

Please use the above link or the below box to become a fan of our new page! It's a great way to stay in touch and to meet your fellow walkers, some of who are listed below. A great big thanks to Marisa Bonanno for getting us started on Facebook with the group. It will remain on Facebook but will be closed to new members and activity.

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Ken, a Worcester resident, joined the MS Challenge Walk in 2005, more than a decade after his mother was diagnosed. After walking for three years and 150 miles, he switched to the support crew and now rides his bicycle along the trail, providing whatever encouragement (and snacks!) he can to the 600 walkers. He is also on the event's steering committee and is this site's webmaster.

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Boundless fundraising on Facebook

Written by Ken on August 3, 2009 at 10:53 am

As you know, the MS Challenge Walk is on Facebook. Now you can use this social network not just to connect with your fellow walkers, but to fundraise, too!

If you already have a Facebook account, visit your Participant Center and click on the "fundraise with Facebook" button. This will enable you to add a prominent box to your profile that states your current fundraising success as well as your goal. From there, any of your friends, family, and co-workers on Facebook will be able to click the "Join Me" or "Support Me" links to help you reach your goal of a world free from MS! You'll also receive Facebook notifications with fundraising tips, as well as updates on your profile page that keep others informed of your participation and fundraising progress.

Both Facebook and the application are completely free, and the application and its box can be removed at any time, so there is no commitment to using it for your fundraising efforts. Try it out and feel free to contact ChallengeMS@mam.nmss.org if you have any questions.

Join the forum discussion on this post

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Ken, a Worcester resident, joined the MS Challenge Walk in 2005, more than a decade after his mother was diagnosed. After walking for three years and 150 miles, he switched to the support crew and now rides his bicycle along the trail, providing whatever encouragement (and snacks!) he can to the 600 walkers. He is also on the event's steering committee and is this site's webmaster.

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Turn every email into a fundraising opportunity

Written by Ken on July 3, 2009 at 12:02 pm

Asking for money is perhaps the hardest part of the MS Challenge Walk. Fortunately, there are many ways to do so. I rely primarily on postal mail, having sent 142 letters of solicitation with self-addressed stamped envelopes (SASEs) back on May 7th.

Another approach is online, and if you're reading this blog, then you're probably a computer maven. Perhaps you don't rely on online communication to the extent I do (since May 7th, I've sent 1,368 personal emails… make that 1,369), but you probably send at least a few messages each day. Why not add an innocuous reminder to each outgoing email that you're campaigning for a world free from multiple sclerosis?

You can do this by adding a brief line to the end of your emails. If you already sign your emails with your name, just extend it a bit further by writing, "I'm walking 50 miles to end multiple sclerosis. Can you help?" Then include a link to your online participant center (which you can make really short — easy for including in an email!).

You can automate your emails so that they always include this closing text by default. Look in your email program on how to define a "signature". For example, here's how to do so in Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

Adding a signature won't cost you any money, and once it's automated, it won't cost you any time, either. Make every email you send work for you!

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Ken, a Worcester resident, joined the MS Challenge Walk in 2005, more than a decade after his mother was diagnosed. After walking for three years and 150 miles, he switched to the support crew and now rides his bicycle along the trail, providing whatever encouragement (and snacks!) he can to the 600 walkers. He is also on the event's steering committee and is this site's webmaster.

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