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

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!

Posted in Fundraising, Online Tools | No Responses »
Tags: email, Gmail, Outlook, solicitation

Submit your events to the blog calendar

Written by Ken on June 24, 2009 at 11:27 am

Did you know the MS Challenge Blog has an event calendar? We collect fundraisers, training events, and team-building activities from all walkers and crew, and we list them here for you to share within the MS Challenge Walk community. If you have such an event that you'd like us to promote on this site, just fill out our event submission form, and we'll add it to our calendar.

You can check out all our upcoming activities at this address:

http://www.challengeblog.org/calendar/

You can also click "Upcoming Events" in the right column of any page of this site. If you scroll farther down, you'll also see a box labeled "Happening Soon", which presents the five next events to occur.

If you use a program like Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook, you can add our event listings to your calendar. Just click on this link:

webcal://www.challengeblog.org/?ec3_ical

Every time we publish a new event, your calendar will be automatically updated. It couldn't be easier to stay connected!

Posted in Online Tools | No Responses »
Tags: calendar, event calendar

Shorten your online donation page's address

Written by Ken on June 12, 2009 at 12:47 pm

As you solicit donations, remember to make use of your online participant center, which lets donors contribute using their credit cards. It's a valuable tool that will increase the quantity and quality of your fundraising. For example, in 2008, 33% of my donations came via my online page, and those donations were 50% larger than those made by check. Apparently, people love to "charge it!"

To make donating online as easy as possible, you should consider abbreviating the address to your page. For example, my default, my donation page is found here:

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/site/TR?px=1866672&pg=personal&fr_id =10051

That's a mouthful! Your participant center has instructions on how to shorten it. For example, the alias for my personal page is

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/kgagne

This method has some problems, though. First, that's still a pretty long address that's not very memorable. Second, each shortcut can be used only once. Since the above address was created for the 2009 MS Challenge Walk, is forever dedicated to that event, and I can't reuse it in 2010.

Instead, try using an online tool with the dedicated function of chopping up long addresses. I recommend either bit.ly or snipurl.com. Both are free and let you define your own short and easy addresses, like mine:

http://snipurl.com/ms-gagne

Should your online donation page's address change (which it does with each MS Challenge Walk you do), you can update your bit.ly or snipurl.com shortcut to point to the new address, meaning you can use the same shortcut every year. That's one less part of your solicitation letter you have to worry about revising! These services also give you statistics on how many people click the link to visit your site, in case you're wondering how popular your page is.

Snipurl.com lets you define an alias and track its usage.

If you need any help getting your shortcut to work, please contact me.

Here's to small addresses and large donations!

Posted in Online Tools | No Responses »
Tags: abbreviation, address, alias, bit.ly, participant center, shortener, snipurl, URL

Joyce Nelson's Challenge Walk blog

Written by Todd on June 8, 2009 at 1:40 pm

Several chapters of the National MS Society have their own MS Challenge Walk. For most of us, walking just a single such walk is a vast undertaking. But for Joyce Nelson, the President & CEO of the National MS Society, each event is an opportunity to meet people from around the world who are dedicated to a world free from MS. So rather than dedicate herself to just one, Joyce is tackling them all.

As Joyce walks in several MS Challenge Walks around the country this summer and fall, you can follow along with her as she trains and walks. Follow her blog at http://nmssociety.blogspot.com/

Of course, we at the Central New England chapter are rather partial to our own walk on Cape Cod. Have you participated in any of our other national events?

Posted in Online Tools | No Responses »
Tags: blog, Joyce Nelson, NMSS

Using your Participant Center to fundraise

Written by Kara on May 6, 2009 at 11:30 am

The Internet is becoming an essential communications tool for many of us, both in our professional and personal lives. Every year, more and more Challenge Walk participants are using email and the web to recruit team members and solicit contributions from friends, family and co-workers. The reason is simple: by using the Internet, you can reach a greater number of people, more efficiently and with greater impact than you can by using the phone or mail alone.

The National MS Society provides every participant with free access to robust and easy-to-use email and web marketing tools to recruit, organize, and manage their fundraising and teams while helping them to solicit and keep track of their own contributors. Through your online Participant Center you can:

Set up a fundraising account and check your progress online
Create and build a personalized Web page to support your fundraising effort
Send emails with links directly to your personal Web page to ask for donations
Use email to invite and motivate team members (team captains only!)
Build a database of team members and contributors to facilitate future communications (you can easily enter the email addresses or upload contacts from other address book applications, such as Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Hotmail, Outlook, or Outlook Express)
Be reminded to send donation reminders and thank yous to donors

Need one-on-one training? Contact me, Kara Kelley, from the MS Challenge Walk Team, and we can work together to increase your knowledge of these tools. By using these tools, you can make 2009 your biggest fund raising year ever and bring us all one step closer to finding a cure for MS.

Posted in Fundraising, Online Tools | No Responses »
Tags: Convio, Internet, participant center

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