General Cycling Discussion - Any MS150 team captains here?

I did my first MS150 last year and started a team at my health facility/spinning facility and I am the captain.

Just looking for any ideas from other captains as to what they did.

We are doing a few longer indoor spinning classes and some outdoor rides for interested team members. May try for some team pledges. Did set up webpage.

Anything I should think to try or to avoid?

Thank you in advance.

I captained a team of 7 from work last year. We scheduled a once a week group ride after work, never got everybody out at once, usually 4 or 5, but it got everyone in shape. Our MS tour was in mid August, we started the group rides in mid-June, started with shorter rides around 15 miles worked up to 40 miles. I had a couple of spare road bikes around and lent them to a couple of guys who were interested, but had MTB's they didn't want to ride for that distance.
Unfortunately our ride got cancelled due to the big power outage, some of us entered shorter MS rides in the area, but not everyone could. We're expecting bigger and better things this year!!

The big thing is letting others (possible contributors) know about the event. We put up lots of posters at work and people were very receptive to donating to the cause. We also got some large donations from companies that work with us and for us on a regular basis. Most companies were surprisingly very willing to contribute.
We didn't do any actual fundraising events, just assigned various departments to the team members. A couple of team members did poorly on the fundraising aspects, but overall we did well.
Have a meeting with your team members, see what ideas they have and what they are willing to do for a fundraiser, you may be surprised at some of the excellent ideas. The key is find out what they want to do and are capable of doing - then it's a group effort and everyone will work together (hopefully!)

I've rode several, and now am the Lt. and instructor/coach for a team of about 190 in the BP MS 150 (Houston - Austin). This is the largest ride of it's kind in the USA, planning on 13,000+ riders this year. http://www.ms150.org/ms150/

Your endurance will be 2 - 3 times your long training ride length, so plan accordingly.

Get your bikes checked out before the ride. The BP ride requires it, I don't know about others.

Find some one (spouses, family, significant others) to run support for you. Haul luggage, food, drink, and such to the overnight point. Makes it nice. If your budget will stand it, a massage after the first day is a small piece of heaven.

Get some training for you team on how to survive massive group rides. This should cover obstacle dodge, holding your line while looking back, quick stops, riding in close proximity to others, pacelining, and care & feeding of the rider. The BP MS 150 ride started pushing training like this after noting that most accidents/injuries on the ride were rider errors. Last year was the first year there was training widely available, and the first year in a long time there was not a medicvac level injury on the ride.

My team's website may give you some ideas. The training presentations I used should be up there soon.
http://www2.lgc.com/ms150/