Sorry, it’s rainy, so I’ve got time on my hands, so you get The Essay.
Typically, charity rides are organized by the charity being benefitted.One of the advantages of doing this is that gives them a large group of non-riding volunteers to be out on the course for the ride.Or, as an alternative, our local bike club does a charity ride each year- but the club itself has the manpower to pull it off.For a business to organize it without having a bunch of volunteers available could get tricky.
It is possible to LOSE money on a ride like that!If you have the ride all set up, order umpteen thousand tee-shirts, then it rains on Ride Day, you’re potentially screwed.So how you work this: you make money on average and you do the ride every year.Then if you have one or two bad years, they’re offset by the good.Also, on any ride, it’ll take time for word to get out that you have a good course, good support, etc. (assuming you do!), so you can expect the ride to grow year by year.If you just do a one-and-done type thing, it’ll be harder to make a good profit.There’s got to be a learning curve on organizing everything, so it’s probably a lot easier the second or third time around.
Given the number of pre-registrations you have, how many same-day registrations can you expect?That is a sixty four dollar question, and the answer is:You use your past experience based on doing the same ride at the same time every year.Which, of course, makes it hard for doing the ride the first year.But those numbers determine how many T-shirts you order, how many portapotties you order, how much food and drink you need, how many volunteers you need, how much parking you need, etc.
Having a route laid out by non-riders is a bad idea, as they are not necessarily aware of issues like road smoothness or traffic issues and what seems to them like a fine route may be terrible to actually ride.
Some people love hills and seek them out, but a lot of people hate hills and would just as soon avoid them.If you have a diehard cyclist plan the course, you’ll have the hill-lover working in every hill he can, and then all your riders will hate you forever.One of the biggest charity rides in Texas just happens to be one of the flattest centuries around, too, and I don’t think that is coincidence.The exception would be if you had a particular notable climb that no other local charity ride went over.Even there, it would help if shorter distance options avoided that climb.
If a coffee shop is organizing the ride, you have the potential to have a really cool T-shirt for the ride, so make that design an integral part of the work, not an afterthought.
On the insurance end of things, the coffee shop needs to talk to their insurance agents and see what is required.A waiver for sure, but a waiver doesn’t remove all liability, either.
Consider whether another charity ride is actually needed in your area.Here in the Dallas area, during the spring and summer, there’s pretty much a big rally every weekend somewhere.So if someone needs to raise money, another one is okay, but it’s not any loss to the cycling community if it doesn’t happen, either.A smaller town with zero rallies, it might be more beneficial just to have it. It may be better for a business to sponsor an existing rally rather than to start a new one.
Look into the cost of having police man intersections.I’ve seen rides with none of that, rides with every stop sign/stop light manned, where riders could roll through all the intersections.Do NOT have police at the first 10 intersections, then assume riders will all just stop at the redlight at the 11[SUP]th[/SUP] intersection!Of course, getting this all lined up makes the ride better, but adds to the fixed cost that you need to cover regardless of number of riders. It's a real drag to get out riding and have to start waiting on 3-minute lights.
I rode the 16 mile option on one charity ride on my Worksman cargo tricycle.I took 2 hours, and I PASSED people while doing it.So yes, there will be people riding that average less than 8 mph.
The first charity ride I ever did, they had some other activities in connection with it, but still, it looked like they had about a thousand T-shirts and about a hundred participants.Weather was fine, that was just poor planning.
I did one ride that normally has about 2,000 participants, and it rained on ride day, and they had about 200 people riding.A month or two later, I was at a large local bike shop, and they were selling surplus ride T-shirts for $3 or so.If they get enough non-refundable pre-registrations, they can avoid actually losing money, but I don’t know how the percentages work out on that.
You can organize a ride and NOT benefit a charity.That’s called being a promoter.There are a lot of bike races that work that way.The main thing there is to be honest about what you’re doing, and don’t try to make it look like a charity ride if it’s not.
In this area, the “standard” charity ride is usually 100k with shorter options.There’s only a few that are actually centuries, and you feel sort of cheated if the longest route is less than 100k. Rest stops are normally 10 miles apart or so. Length of the shorter options will vary depending on what the roads are- typically 16 miles, 25 miles, 40 miles, 100k- something like that.
The ideal route is sort of a ladder shape, where you go out one way, come back another way, and depending on what distance you’re doing, you cut across at different points.It’s advantageous if multiple distances can use the same rest stops.Out-and-backs are not as much fun, but let you re-use rest stops. It should be okay for people to be able to switch to a shorter route while they're riding, and a course that allows that is advantageous. That'll save you having to haul them in.
It helps to have support from local bike shops for their sag support.
A few of the local rides are billed as “races”, and may actually give out prizes to the winners, etc, but they’re not normal licensed bike races, and 95% of the participants are just there for the ride.Better practice is to just bill it as a “ride, not a race” in the first place.
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