"to raise money for charity"

April 7, 2005 6:46 PM

Occasionally in the local news there are stories about someone going on an extreme expedition "to raise money for charity". However the mechanism by which the doing leads to the raising is never mentioned. Can anyone explain?

Check out this one. The obvious thing would be that local companies might be sponsoring him, but given the publicity generated seems to amount to this one short local news item in which no companies are mentioned, it'd make much more sense prestige-wise to donate directly, especially given the presumably huge costs of the expedition.

posted by cillit bang to Society & Culture (2 answers total)

I always thought it would be in the form of pledges, as in the case of the people I know who run marathons. They get their friends and co-workers etc. to pledge so much a kilometre.
posted by orange swan at 6:49 PM on April 7, 2005

Best answer: Well, Starlight themselves tell you how to set it up, and Charity Challenge is actually a company that sets that sort of thing up for Starlight and others. It does seem that you have to do a lot of the sponsorship legwork yourself, but I assume that the UK has the same sort of tax incentives that make it easy for employers to match contributions, and often there will be a major underwriter or two at least covering basic costs.
posted by dhartung at 8:10 PM on April 7, 2005