HL: Rickshaws For Water
SF: Six men. Two Rickshaws. One Goal.
By @Sumana_Raja and @allanjits


In January of 2009, we took part in the Rickshaw Rally India. It is a cool charity “race.” Basically, participants race about 3000km in an auto-rickshaw. The 2009 race started in Pondicherry and ended in Shillong. However, there are no prizes for finishing first, just the satisfaction of raising money for charity. We have to admit, at the first instance, it was a decision based on frivolity. We just wanted to go out there and have some fun travelling around India in a manner that we would never usually do. Being member of the Jaded Travellers Collective, we don’t even like the path less trodden, we like to tread new paths.

But then, raising money for charity started to consume us. We chose to donate to the charity Frank Water, and decided on raising a sum of $50,000, enough to build three water plants in India. We came up with a marketing strategy for big corporate sponsors – basically a business plan which included revenue generation channels for several big companies. This sort of marketing plan usually costs about $100,000. We generated a lot of interest in the early part of 2008 and secured some donations. However, by the time August 2009 rolled around, no corporate company was thinking of anything charitable that hadn’t been tried and tested. With talk of sub-prime loans changing to talk of a global financial crisis, all our corporate sponsors withdrew their offers.

Undeterred, we went guerrilla style. Using a social media platform, we started engaging friends first and then moved beyond to a larger network. We did some silly challenges to spur interest – for example one of us bet our FaceBook group (which had about 600 people) that I could drink a bottle of fish sauce. We filmed the event, people placed bets – which would all go to charity. The person lost, and got sick, but we managed to raise $50 for charity. Another one of us ate a tub of mayonnaise for charity. The videos helped to engage our FaceBook group, and no doubt helped to spread the message about what we were doing. None of the donations came directly to us. Instead, we used the web site justgiving.com, to keep our effort completely guerrilla, viral and online.

We even took a leaf out of the Girl Guides Cookie scheme and started baking lemon and blueberry tarts for charity. We delivered the tarts, and left the onus of donating money to the person – all we did was handout a name card that listed our micro-site on justgiving.com. In the end, we raised more than $50,000 (of which almost 90% was donated online), and the press value that we generated amounted to more than $250,000, which would have been a handsome return if any of the companies took our marketing plan.

Now we are taking it a step further. We are bringing the race to Southeast Asia, and producing a “socially-conscious” version of the Amazing Race. Instead of doing physical challenges as a race, teams will have to do something social, depending on the route we choose and the local NGO contacts we have. They will have to plant trees or help build a well, for example. We are close to securing funding from Singapore, and are working with The Adventurists, who are the organizers. We want to develop this concept of “travel philanthropy.”

Check out our FaceBook page: Search for Rickshaws4water
Go to http://www.justgiving.com/rickshaws4waterg
Go to http://www.theadventurists.com/