By Ethan Maurice | January 30th, 2019
Today I’m releasing Man Bites Dog! a downloadable PDF guide to raising a ridiculous amount of money for charity through creative endeavor.
Over the summers of 2013 and 2014, I raised over $100,000 for charity with two attention-demanding, audacious undertakings. First, my brother and I pedaled bicycles 4,450 miles across the USA for the children's hospital that saved my life. The following summer, I backpacked 200+ miles through the Sierra Nevada mountains to “summit” both type-1-diabetes and the highest mountain in the contiguous United States with my younger sister.
Mostly thanks to an article on Bicycle Touring Pro, I've been privately advising others on the process since. Two years ago, I thought it worthwhile to write down my formula to distribute on a larger scale. After picking up and putting down the project a couple of times, reworking the structure, and putting more time into these fifty-six pages than I’d like to admit, and it’s finally finished!
At its core, Man Bites Dog! is about building creative endeavors/projects that demand attention and spread naturally to raise funds for your cause. Encompassing more than athletic endeavor, the guide seeks to inspire using examples from Australia's “Spider-Man,” the German Center for Political Beauty, and links to some of the greatest PR stunts of all time to get your creative juices flowing as you envision and build a fundraiser designed to spread like wildfire among friends, family, and—if done right—the mass audiences of the media.
My own fundraisers landed dozens of television interviews, radio segments, and newspaper articles and traversed the internet on blogs and podcasts reaching audiences exponentially larger than we could have ever managed on our own—this guide's goal is to help you do the same.
“Man Bites Dog!” comes from an old news adage loosely attributed to a dozen different people. I like the phrasing attributed to London’s early 20th century newspaperman, Lord Northcliffe, best:
“If a dog bites a man, that's not news. If a man bites a dog, that's news.”
Like the quote, this guide is about flipping the traditional fundraising model on its head. Instead of joining a crowd of people all doing the same thing to raise funds for charity, we avoid the crowd all-together, building our own fundraisers that are so crazy, controversial, or catchy that the crowd can't help but watch.
To take you step-by-step through the process, the guide is structured chronologically:
In the age of the internet, talk of the town can reach around the globe. Even as individuals, we have the opportunity to build fundraisers that can spread exponentially farther and faster than ever before. If you can provoke an emotional response—shock, awe, anger, empathy, wonder, inspiration, joy etc.—your fundraiser has the potential to reach millions of potential donors.
This guide will help you approach your fundraiser from an abstract, creative angle and take you through the entire process of building a fundraiser with six-figure potential (our cross-country bicycle ride raised $96,281 for Phoenix Children's Hospital).
It is with great stoke that I finally put this out in the world! It's a niche guide and won't apply to everyone, but I have high hopes for Man Bites Dog! to help a whole lot of people do a whole lot of good.
The button below will take you to the Man Bites Dog! download page:
Man Bites Dog! costs $9.99. However, I want this to be accessible to everyone and you can apply any discount to that price you'd like, taking up to 100% off.
