Last Updated on 18 September 2026:
I’ve had the honour and privilege to coach, work with and call friends many amazing people who have raised incredible amounts for worthy causes, including Mark Beaumont, Ben Smith and Dean Stott. I’m also proud to have raised and donated tens of thousands for mental health charities. But raising money for charity by cycling can create a difficult balance when the demands of fundraising begin to compete with the training and focus needed for the challenge itself.
Covered in this blog
- Why you should raise money for (or donate to) charity
- The problem with raising money for charity
- Expectation
- Negative mindset
- How to raise money for charity by cycling
- Build your team
- Top 5 tips for raising money for charity by cycling
- Summary
- Top 5 other ways to help others
Why you should raise money for (or donate to) charity
There is some falsity behind the statement “money can’t buy you happiness”. A study conducted in 2014 by Pradnya K.Surana showed that people do tend to be happier with money, when they donate it. Those in the experimental group (those who gave money to charity) showed improvements in their own wellbeing, including improvements in life satisfaction and self-esteem, over those in the control group (who spent money on themselves), who actually experienced higher post-test levels of money-related anxiety.
“The results provide corroboration for the powerful idea that charity does not only benefit the recipient, but positively impacts upon the donor too.”
The problem with raising money for charity
The problem comes when we burden ourselves with the amount of money raised and the logistics around raising it. Speaking from personal experience, and from working with many clients who actively raise money for charity too, the fundraising itself can be more demanding than the cycling challenge. You will spend far more time and energy talking to people, businesses, creating content, and generally seeking donations than you do actually training.
Expectation
The bigger problem arises when you start to expect to see a return for that hard work. When you pour your heart and soul into something and you don’t see that reciprocated it can be heartbreaking. It’s demoralising when you don’t see your efforts being recognised via donations. At least so is your projection of this.
Of course, the amount you want to raise for charity is totally subjective and often very relative. Someone who is looking to ride their first century might only want to raise a few hundred pounds for charity, but those who want to compete at Race Across America might want tens of thousands. The amount is completely irrelevant, it’s the weight of expectation placed upon ourselves that is so costly.
Negative mindset
Unfortunately, all this negative mindset does is dramatically increase your chances of event failure. Your event will be (should be) challenging and you almost certainly have thoughts of quitting. These thoughts can easily be exacerbated by a perceived lack of donations (“why bother?”). It will become very easy to just quit. That is, of course, if you even make it to the start line after mentally burning out from all the fundraising work you will do.
How to raise money for charity by cycling
I feel there are two main options for successfully raising money using your sporting event. The first would be to simply not raise money for charity at all. Sounds odd, but with the time and energy you will save, on not fundraising for yourself, could be spent on someone else’s campaign. This is a much more selfless approach as you are likely to receive less kudos, but you will almost certainly help someone raise more money without the emotional attachment to the amount raised, thus increasing your own chances of success in your cycling event another time.
Build your team
The second is to build a team around you that will help support you with your efforts. If you are committed to fundraising, you will, at a certain point, need to step back from this and focus entirely on completing the event itself. Unless your challenge is easy for you to complete, you will find the additional workload during the event impossible to manage.
Ideally, you will have a fundraising manager from the start who can help you organise your content creation, liaise with businesses for corporate donations, and maximise the effectiveness of this side of the event. However, having a friend or family member step in at a certain point and assume this role from you is the next best thing. During your event, you don’t need to know how much has been raised as it’ll never be enough. Simply distance yourself from this until the end so the fundraising total doesn’t become a morale killer.
Top 5 tips for raising money for charity by cycling
Regardless of how much you want to raise, the goal you have set to do this with, or any other factor, here are my top tips to getting the balance between fundraising and cycling performance right.
- Pair with a buddy and share responsibility; one event you ride and your buddy does the ground work, then you swap
- Consider building a team around you. If volunteers are sparse, consider commission based fundraising roles only
- At some point, plan to step back from fundraising and remain ignorant of the amount raised
- Do the mental fitness work to help remove expectation from fundraising
- If this seems too stressful, don’t! Find another way to help those less fortunate than you, so you just focus on riding
Summary
Helping others matters, but protecting your energy, mindset and preparation will give your cycling challenge the best chance of success. If you would like support planning the training side of a demanding event, Book a Free Consultation.
Top 5 other ways to help others
If all this seems too stressful right now, imagine how worse this will feel after months of training and fundraising knock-backs. Here are my top 5 ways that don’t involve cycling to help others.
- Donate a % of your income to charity
- Donate your time to charity
- Donate your skill to others
- Be there for someone who needs it
- Try to be the best version of yourself, everyday
