British Airways Charity climb Kilimanjaro

With lots of companies promoting charity challenges to climb Kilimanjaro you would think that setting up your own challenge would be easy.  In fact people find the whole thing incredibly complicated and as result many give up before they even start.  Basically the charity challenge model is incredibly bureaucratic and it often seems that the rules are there to frustrate rather than encourage fundraisers.  Problems they encounter include:

They have to pay a big up front deposit themselves – entirely non-refundable – up to £500 before they can even register and start promoting their charity.  When you are not sure of the response you might get this is a big risk  and if you are unable to climb for any reason you lose all this

The total amount they have to raise before they can do the trek can be huge, often well over £4,000 per person, when the cost of the trek and flight is no more than £2000.  This is intended to reduce the concern that the challenge is just a “holiday paid for by charity donations” – in fact all it does it deter genuine fundraisers

If they get started on fundraising but don’t raise the full amount then they either lose the deposit and cannot do the climb or have to make up all of the difference themselves – in the worst case this could be more than the actual cost of the climb.

They cannot decide for themselves and with their sponsors how much of the cost they self fund-each charity challenge company has slightly different rules but none of them allow a fundraiser to act like a grown up and decide for themselves

And perhaps the worst thing they find is that the total cost built into the charity trek is often way over the top, sometimes as much as £500 more than it would be if they shopped around.

If they do not raise the full amount or are unable to trek, for any reason, donations that have already been passed onto the charity by their friends cannot be returned –  this has proven to be very embarrassing in a number of cases!

All of these problems become barriers to taking on the challenge and inevitably less charity events happen and less is raised for great causes. Not only that, but even if you get your charity challenge to climb Kilimanjaro up and running if you use justgiving they charge you 5% of everything you raise which again is a lot of money.

So what are the alternatives? If you use a good specialist Kilimanjaro operator rather than you would be find that you can:

• Book and get started fundraising with a deposit of only £200pp
• Get a much lower price overall for the trek so more goes to your charity
• Decide for yourself how much you want to self fund, from zero to 100%
• And some operators will even refund your deposit on a charity climb if you are unable to do the trip.
• And to avoid paying commission on the money you raise try this
• Set up an email address for your charity climb eg Ben’s_Kilimanjaro_climb@gmail.com
• Set up a paypal account with this email and get your friends and family to send donations to this account as gifts- paypal charge you nothing for this

When you have raised all the funds you can pay for the climb from the paypal account directly and send all the rest of the money direct to the charity. If you do not go ahead for any reason you simply refund the donations and that is that.

And that is it, an easy and effective way to organize your charity Kilimanjaro climb.

Share on Facebook