Blinding Realization

We currently have a couple of ways to measure our success. The most obvious is the overall theme of the trip — whether or not we make it to all 31 NFL stadiums — and we’ve managed to stay on track even with our many hicups. The second factor is a little more difficult to evaluate – donations. I don’t know that we ever had a definitive goal, but I do know that my expectations have dropped as the trip has progressed. That being said, I think we’ve finally figured it out.

**Note that these are my thoughts and mine alone. Nate and Aaron could and more than likely do disagree in some areas.

When we started our adventure it looked as though it would be easy to raise money. It is a ridiculous trip in it’s own right, plus it’s for a good cause. We are traveling 30k miles to 40 football games, all in an RV wrapped with our information. We thought that the exposure alone would surely garner some attention. At our tailgates we would explain what we’re doing, collect donations and sell merchandise. Additionally we would accept donations via our website. Unfortunately the online donation process hasn’t brought in as much as thought it would.

From my observations raising money before a game isn’t exactly hard, it’s just consuming. It’s rather common to see someone wandering around collecting donations for various causes. Sure this is an option, but it’s not realisitic for us. In doing so you’re giving up part of the football experience – tailgating. Walking around for the entire pregame is not the same. Hell, Setting up and handling a tailgate is a lot of work on its own. Beyond that I assume most of the others raising money are from the area and have the opportunity to come back for the next home game. This is obviously impossible for us considering the nature of our trip. It’s not that we don’t want to put in effort to raise money, it’s that we want to fully experience the uniqueness of each venue. For no other sport do fans tailgate like we do for football.

This leaves us with people stopping by on their own. The RV is definitely a good tool to get attention and with it we attract a lot of passerbys who check out the schedule. We talk with a lot of them, which allows us to futher explain our cause. This is what we had hoped for, but I think we also had thought that more of these interactions would result in a donation – only a small percentage do. What we have to consider is that these are more or less random interactions with people who just happen to be nearby, not people who are looking for us.

What we weren’t too succesful at in the past was connecting with people who see or read an interview and want to contribute. That was the case until this past weekend in St. Louis. We interviewed on Saturday, the day before the game, unlike our normal interviews at the actual tailgate. This little change produced drastic results. We had so many people stopping by that we were barely able to setup. I was even more impressed with who stopped by: a group of fire fighters, a police officer rode in on his motorcycle, lots of vets, and just tons of supportive people.

In retrospect this get-coverage-prior-to-game-day idea makes perfect sense — you have to give people a chance to actually visit. We probably would have realized this sooner had we not had trouble with the RV. Our Fresno tailgate was canceled since we were barely even able to make the game after swapping out the RV to get it repaired. There were multiple stories about us in the local news leading to numerous emails from people wanting to meet up. I can only imagine had it ended up being similar to St. Louis we would have figured this out a long time ago.

Another interesting fact is that our online donations do not seem to correlate with media exposure. But now that we’ve figured out the key to allowing interested people to show their support in person, I’m not really surprised that the impersonal nature of online donations aren’t that successful. I suspect that our online donations will continue to be more for people who know or have met us and want to donate at a later time.

At the time of this writing we’ve raised nearly $4,000. This is certainly nothing to complain about. We’re always learning, but by using a different media strategy and a little more effort I think we can bring a lot more in during this final month.