Long response, because this is a topic near and dear to me.
I first got into bike touring (and long-distance athletics in general) by joining a thing at my university called Texas 4,000. Basically, a bunch of UT students ride bikes from Austin to Anchorage and raise money for the American Cancer Society. We slept in churches, high school gyms, camped out, whatever was free or as cheap as possible, because the less we spent on the ride, the more we could give to our cause. Along the way, we did "cancer awareness" presentations in the communities we visited, and also visited children's hospitals in the few big cities we passed through.
My year we raised about $300,000, but about $75,000 went towards the cost of the ride. We were each required to raise $4,000 on our own. My family is small and not rich, so I wound up selling my car and used half the money to fulfill the last of my quota. Some of my teammates had large wealthy families and easily doubled their quota. Nowadays, I think Texas 4,000 raises over $500,000/year, and I would imagine the overheads are still about the same.
Fast forward nine years, I still love bike touring. When you roll into town on a bike in the middle of nowhere, people ask what on earth you're doing. If you can say you're raising money for charity and turn their attention to a good cause, why not? So I still do. I'm still not a good fundraiser, and by now, my family is uninterested in writing a check to a charity because I'm going for a bike ride again. And when I get into town, I'm already asking around for a place to set up my tent, so I'm hesitant to also ask for money, even if it's not for me. I'm lucky if I can raise $500 in one summer. Makes me wonder how others raise tens of thousands. What words do they say that I don't?
As I'm sure everyone here knows, you get a lot of time to think while on tour, so I wondered why there isn't a site that combines a blog, photo sharing, maps of your progress, crowdfunding for charity, and has an app so you can write journals offline. I was using something like six different sites and apps to do all this. So I went to a library, checked out some books, learned five programming languages, and made a website for touring cyclists:
PackJournal.com
Basically, you pick your favorite charity from our list, you can keep up to 25% for yourself (if you do, donors are told before they donate), and the rest goes to the charity. Free to sign up, anyone can use it. And you can post journals, photos, see maps of where you took your photos and wrote your journals, and there's an app so you can write journals in your phone when you don't have a signal, then upload them later.
So even if I'm not good at raising money for charity, maybe I've created a tool that helps someone else raise money for charity. If so, I'll feel like I made a positive difference. Currently, I'm losing money keeping the site online, but I'm holding out on the hope that it makes a difference one day. That and I love bike touring, and it's a small way of giving to the bike touring community.
I can see the disconnect - how exactly does riding my bike do anything to change the number of malignant cells in someone's body? It doesn't. Nor does it build houses for the homeless, feed the hungry, etc. When I saw sick kids in the hospital, it made me realize that while people fawn over the fact that I was riding a bike to Alaska, it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But if you were going to do the ride whether anyone donates or not, and if you can use the attention you receive and direct it to a worthy cause that needs help, I don't see anything wrong with that.