Yesterday I spoke to the ‘soft launch’ of the annual Colourthon, a sponsored walk (well, several for different ages and abilities) that takes place in Southend, Essex on the first Saturday in July.
There was a good sized audience from across the business community and from many small charities who rely on the Colourthon to help them get noticed and raise funds, even in a small way. There were presentations from some of the charities including Southend University Hospital and The Silver Lining, a charity that helps support brain injured people. One of their supporters who is themselves brain injured, managed to complete 500m of the course last year and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house hearing about it.
As you know I asked over the weekend if readers could help me collect together some experiences and advice from people who use social media to help their charitable giving, and you can see what they contributed on the blog post comments here. Several of these stories featured in the slides which you can see below.
After the talk I was delighted to meet some of the many people there, including several people involved in supporting the Colourthon from Southend’s construction community. I also got to chat to Web Developer Jon Stanton who developed the Colourthon website and had given the participant charities a guide to how they can use the site to recruit walkers to support their work.
Unlike many other ‘umbrella’ charitable events, the Colourthon passes on 100% of funds raised by walkers direct to the charities they are raised for, without creaming a percentage off the top. Having met the participants last night I can see why, they are a great bunch of people putting in a lot of effort. Since the Colourthon was launched in 2007 they have raised over £750,000 for over 550 charities.
Below is the handout I produced in support of my talk. It can be downloaded as a pdf. Please feel free to pass it on to charities you know, and to encourage people who want to get involved in the Colourthon 2013 to visit their website.
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