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Friday, July 31, 2009
Local firms help Pan Mass Challenge raise funds using virtual bikers
By Galen Moore
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This weekend, 5,000 cyclists will pedal across the state to raise money for cancer research in the Pan Mass Challenge. But this year, the annual ride to benefit the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund hopes to raise additional funds — from riders traversing a virtual landscape.
A web-based fundraising application built by two Massachusetts companies is using a virtual-goods model to expand the Pan Mass Challenge’s fundraising horizons. The application, called PaceLine, lets donors create online avatars that join a rider’s fundraising campaign on a tandem bicycle with an infinite number of seats. Each donor can then start his or her own PaceLine page, inviting friends to add to their contribution. The avatars display each donor’s reason for giving using a pop-up text field and icons.
Most important to Ted Schlueter, who rides this year for the first time in memory of his father, have been the connections he’s made with other cyclists. Schlueter’s Boston-based brand management and development company, Crunch Brand Communications, helped develop the Flash application that sits on top of PMC’s Active Server Page-based online fundraising system — along with Weymouth-based MWare Inc.
One friend whom Schlueter asked for a donation revealed his motivation for giving through his online avatar: a father battling esophageal cancer. “I’m learning stuff about my friends and family I didn’t even know,” Schlueter said.
He said the idea for the online application came from PMC founder and executive director Billy Starr, who noted the ultimate constraint on how much money the event can raise: a physical limit on the number of riders and the number of routes. With a virtual fundraising mechanism like PaceLine, PMC can create “an endless chain of cyclists around the globe,” Starr said in a press release on the new application.
For Doug Haslam, an account director at technology public relations firm Shift Communications LLC, using technology to raise money is nothing new. It’s his second year riding the PMC. Last year, the micro-blogging service Twitter was a powerful fundraising tool. This year, with a more diverse crowd on Facebook, that’s the system he’s relying on most.
But PaceLine’s visual representation of a network of givers does something different, he said.
“If people see other people are doing it, then there’s a bit of a feel that you’re not doing this by yourself,” Haslam said. “Action begets action. If you see that 100 people donated and this is actually doing some good, then you’re more likely to join.”
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