new zealand …uphill

An idiot’s guide to a charity bike ride – Part IV: Keeping everyone informed

June 25, 2009 on 12:53 pm | In Getting started | No Comments

Doing a solo challenge is not only tough physically, but mentally and emotionally too.  There are a bunch of people out there who will ultimately be the people who will get you to the end, through the highs and the lows and they are your supporters.  They will provide you the motivation to keep going, I guarantee it.  But you are in the middle of nowhere, and they are not.  How do you communicate?  How can you inspire others to follow you and give money for the charity you are fund-raising for?

It’s the Internet stupid!  Today it is not hard to be connected on the go through the use of an internet enabled mobile phone ,and one of these will keep you sane.  On my trip I found it very lonely, and often stopped on the side of the road feeling down and out after 4 hours of riding over hills wondering if I would ever make it to my destination.  I would pull out my phone and check for messages from people online and whenever I got one from one of my supporters out there, it would really pick my spirits up and I would off again with new bounce.  I communicated with people through my blog, using twitter, Facebook, YouTube and various photo sharing sites.  Here is a run down on how you can easily setup and use each of these to keep everyone informed and gain more supporters, both online and in the real world.

A blog.

Get a blog.  It is really easy to do and quick to set up and this will be your platform for communicating with the world.  You can set up a free blog online at www.wordpress.com, www.tumblr.com, www.blogger.com and through a number of other very easy to use online services.  I used WordPress.  You will be able to customise the look and feel to your liking.  Your blog will be your website that people will go to to find out all about your adventure, and should have details on why you are doing it, info on how people can help/donate, and lots and lots of posts from you about what you are doing, where you have been and what you are experiencing AS YOU GO.  I would write a full run down on my trip roughly once a week, and each day would post a quick update letting people know where I was and where I was going.  This made it real, relevant and current to all the people who are following your progress.  Once you have the blog the next step is to let people know it is there.

Social networking (Twitter, Facebook).

The easiest way to make people aware of your trip is to use all of your existing contacts, friends and family, to spread the word.  You can use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to help you here.  Before you go, start updating your status on Twitter and Facebook to let people know you are about to go on a fantastic adventure, and give a link out to your blog for more info.  Then when you are underway, update your status as you go, as frequent as you like.  I primarily used Twitter to update people on the go as it is more of a “now” thing.  On my rest breaks I would tweet from my phone where I was, what I was doing or any interesting observations from my ride.  Then the cool thing was that within minutes I got replies back from people following my progress.  People love the fact that you can be on a bike or pogo stick in the middle of nowhere and be sharing the experience with others.  It is relatively easy to send photos from your phone through Twitter and Facebook also, and this is a fabulous way to let people live vicariously through you and your adventure.

YouTube.

As I went I took a small portable video camera, a Flip MinoHD.  These are ultra light and compact and let you film stuff as you go, that you can later plug into a computer and upload to video sharing sites like YouTube or Vimeo.  I edited mine as I went on a laptop allowing me to add music and nice cuts and transitions.  Unfortunately this meant having to carry an extra 4kg of computer with me but it was well worth it.  Every week I posted up a video of my progress and the feedback I got was awesome.

Video is also a great way to virally spread awareness of your journey through the Internet and it is much more entertaining and novel than a regular blog post.  When you put up a new video, use Twitter and Facebook to send a status message with a link to the video.

If you are posting videos to YouTube, be sure to embed them into your blog also.  From your YouTube account just follow the ‘embed’ instructions which will give you some code to cut and paste into your blog post, and viola.

I edited all my video on my laptop, my MacBook, using iMovie which has to be one of the easiest video editing programs I have ever used.  If you are not familiar with video editing and want to do video updates as you go, then I strongly suggest taking a Mac and using iMovie.  It will make it so much easier.

Photo sharing.

There are of course photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa but I just used quick and easy pic.im and twitpic.com to send photos from my mobile phone as I went, and again automatically tweeted links to these through Twitter.  It gave people a near instantaneous snapshot of where you are and what you can see.

Google Maps.

A great way to show where you have been and where you are going is to put some maps into your site.  Google maps is really easy to embed into a blog post, like I did, to show a daily route.  Again just look for the “embed” link and follow the instructions.

Email.

Send out emails to everyone in your address book.  This is probably the only time you are going to get away with a mail bomb to all you know  Write a good email detailing what you are doing and invite all your friends to get in behind you, by visiting your blog, watching videos, following you on Twitter and so on.  Then ask them to tell all their friends.  When you are one week into the trip, send another one letting them know you are on your way.

Take a good phone.

To keep connected you will need a good internet enabled phone, and one preferably that can run downloaded applications like a good Twitter client, so you are not having to wrestle with the mini web browser built in to the phone.  I took my iPhone with me and it was the near perfect device.  I could take photos and send them instantaneously through to Twitter.  I could surf the web, send emails and play games when I was bored in the evening.

I also took a laptop.  It let me do more intensive things like write long blog posts and edit video and photos without needing to visit an Internet cafe.  You can get away with doing all of the above by using Internet cafes, but these may be few and far between in some parts, and you will have some problems editing video as you won’t likely have access to a good video editing program.

Pester the media.

Good media coverage is invaluable but it is hard to wrangle it.  The only tip I can give here is to email and phone every newspaper, current affairs/news TV show, radio station, blog site you can and ask others to do the same.  The media will start of a little sceptical, and they wont cover your trip on day one.  They will want to know you are serious and will actually get to the end so don’t get disheartened.  The further you go the more likely you will get more coverage.  Hit the local, regional newspapers and radio stations a few days ahead of when you will be arriving so they have plenty of time to arrange a photographer or a slot on the radio breakfast show.  Now I found this all pretty hard going.  I would spend my evenings writing emails and making phone calls and when you are talking to media after slogging your guts out on a bike all day it is a struggle to sound upbeat and enthusiastic.  If you can offload all the media wrangling off to someone else to do.  This way you can focus on your goal.  I am a sadist, and wanted to see if I could do it all myself, but I can tell you this, it is no picnic.  In the end I got some fantastic help from someone in the PR game which ended up in some really awesome coverage.

Make it easy for people to donate.

There are great ways to let people to donate to your cause easily.  You have the traditional can of coins to collect as you go but this can get kinda heavy on a bike.  Talk to a lot of people and tell them what you are doing.  People will be more than happy to buy you lunch, or give you a fiver after a quick chat.  It is a good idea to get a t-shirt or a sign made up that makes it clear to passers by that you are doing it all for charity.  I just walked up to people and talked to them, purely out of loneliness, but once I started getting media exposure people started coming up to me.  Make it easy for people to identify you.  I wore a bright red jacket in all the newspaper articles and on TV and then wore it every day.  This helped make me recognisable.  I also have a really big moustache so that probably helped too

Sign up with a site like www.givealittle.co.nz, where they enable people to donate money to your cause easy and online with either a voucher or a credit card.  e-commerce for your fundraiser!  They can also be your blog to and let you post up frequent updates about your adventure that informs all your Givealittle supporters automatically.  They also have a cool widget that you can embed into your site that gives the current total raised so far.

Lastly give out a postal address or even a bank account number so people can send you money in other ways.  Corporate sponsors will want to be able to do this.

So in conclusion, if you can do all of the above then you will get some pretty good online support and following, but it all depends on what you have the appetite for.  I had a lot of free time in the evenings so was quite happy to tap away writing blog posts and chatting to people online.  You might prefer to sleep  I knew it was all working when my wife stopped ringing me every day.  After a few days of silence I had to ring her to make sure everything was okay.  ”Yeah we are all good.  I didn’t bother ringing as I just read your blog, scanned your tweets, looked at your photos and checked out your map for tomorrow.  I can see you are still alive.”

Next will be the final post in this series – getting to the end, where I will wrap it all up explaining how to make sure you get to the finish line.