As you might know I’m currently doing sponsor events for Tour for Life, to collect funds for the Daniel den Hoed Foundation, for cancer research.
Aniel and me have been doing this for the 3rd year now. And we noticed quite big differences in proceeds per location. You’d think large crowds (like on Dam Square in Amsterdam) would guarantee large amounts of donations. Not so. A more humble place like my home town Gouda outdid them by a factor of 9 in the same year!
But let’s be honest: we stayed longer in Gouda. That was because we saw it was so much more effective. But still. Can we get more honest data on our sponsoring events?
What data do I have?
At first I thought I had very little data. I get a mail every time someone uses our QR code (or sponsor page) to donate. That mail has a timestamp too. So I can use that also.
Then I need to have the time our sponsor event lasted, so I can calculate donations per hour. Luckily I use my cycling computer on my stationary bike during the whole event. And this data gets uploaded to Strava. And here I need to use Elapsed time, not the Movement time.
So now I have duration data and you can see that our time on Dam Square was a lot shorter. Still doesn’t explain why Gouda delivered so many more donations. Because we didn’t stay 9 times as long.
At least I can now calculate the amount of donations per hour and see what location is the most “generous per hour”. But the totals include the donations via social media. That says not a lot about the location itself. So let me exclude that and then you get this result:
Gouda is still doing great. But this year had less donations per hour than previous years. Why is that? I think I can answer that question: it was pouring with rain that day. That means: fewer people passing by. And we decided after 3 hours we were soaked enough to call it quits.
Two other locations did very well: Bleiswijk and Ede. But Bleiswijk was a bit of an outlier. I was there with my father and his girlfriend Trijnie. And they knew a lot of people. Also, Trijnie used to be a market vendor. She sold cheese. Altogether they convinced a lot of people to donate. You would think I should repeat that. But both my father and Trijnie are in their 80s and unfortunately currently not in shape for another round.
My guess would be that the amount per donation were higher in Bleiswijk though. Can we see that?
Average amount donated
We could see that, if I had individual donation data. For cash that’s a bit hard to do. I’m not going to whip out my Excel sheet when people put money in our hat-shaped piggy bank. But for QR code donations: I’ve got those mails, right?
So this was a bit of manual labour. I went through all the mails and noted the donation amounts. And then you see indeed that Bleiswijk was a bit of an outlier.
But also, look at Ede! What happened there? Well there was one generous donation of 50 euros (and two of 25 euros) that boosted Ede’s stats quite a bit.
Data driven sponsor location?
All this helps us to find what location worked well previously. Based on this data we know where we should return next year. I don’t think having sponsor events in Gouda or Ede every week would work very well.
Last time I asked ChatGPT to find the best location. I asked to base it on cities where people are more fit and financially strong. That brought us to Leiden and that worked quite well. It didn’t come up with Ede though.
I’ve also asked ChatGPT on what data it based its decision. It used data from the Dutch office for statistics (CBS) and apparently there’s a site with health statistics: https://www.vzinfo.nl. That might be something to explore next.
If you want to help, you can donate here BTW: https://supporta.cc/lfqd/z0qpn9xqox