A question has been raised regarding whether ride directors for bike events that are for non-profit organizations should be paid a salary to organize and plan the ride, or if this should be done on a purely volunteer basis. I am trying to find information on how other rides across the country are handling this. Do ride directors normally get paid a salary and if so, how much is the norm? Anyone have any information or thoughts on this?
Personally, I would be less inclined to participate in a charity bike ride if the staff was paid out of my donation money.
I know that the local charity rides around where I live are run by unpaid volunteers. I'm guessing that the super expensive (more than $200 per participant), but I never go on those.
There is an incredible amount of work involved in putting on a well run charity ride. For rides with a large amount of participants it is almost mandatory to hire a professional. Even the smaller rides need to hire a company to do the online registrations.
There are also some rides that are totally created and set up by a promotion company. They go out and solicit a charity to be the sponsor. In some cases those charities get only a small percentage of the revenues.
In other words, the promoters are giving some of their profit to the charity, keeping the charities expense ratio at zero.
Most charity rides are totally legitimate and only spend a small percentage of the revenue on expenses. But to say you will never do a ride that uses paid staff is like saying you will never donate to a charity that has employees.
What sized charity rides are you talking about? There are several century rides in my area with 5000 participants that are entirely run by volunteers. Of course there are expenses like food and portable toilets and renting space for rest stops, but the labor is all free volunteer work, including the management. If a charity doesn't have enough volunteers to support this level of fund raising, makes you wonder if the charity is really worthwhile.Originally Posted by CardiacKid
If a bike ride is really being run as a for-profit operation, I hope they are stating that in their literature. Putting the name of a charity in the title, but only giving them a fraction of the proceeds, is a big scam.
I am talking about a ride that has 300-350 participants. The ride is worked by volunteers, but has 2 paid staff members that coordinate everything that needs to be done for the ride such as finding sponsors, in-kind donations of food and water, coordinating with police for escorts through the city, permits, setting up rest stop areas, getting banners, T-shirt, jersey designs, insurance, and on and on for the many things that need to come together to make a ride happen. If you know of large rides that have no paid staff at all, can you please tell me what rides these are, because I would like to contact them to find out how this is done.
How can a ride with only 300 participants possibly pay the salaries of 2 staff members and still have an interesting amount of money left to fund the charity?
One of the biggest century rides in Silicon Valley is the Tierra Bella century. They get around 5000 participants and they have no paid staff, just volunteers. I'm guessing that the large majority of century rides in this area run entirely by volunteers and most have more than 1000 participants. There's no secret about how they do this. You need to have enough volunteers to support the event and spread out the work load. If you can't find enough volunteers for this kind of event, then maybe you should ask your supporters about what kind of events they are willing to work on.
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