Modern Buddy

With the cannonball fast approaching, I came up with the idea about riding for a cause. Recently, a young police officers from here lost his life after a long fight with cancer. Just before passing away, his wife gave birth to their first child. Cancer really sucks. I would like to raise money on my upcoming ride to his son's college fund, and ask for donations based on mileage. The route is approximately 2500 miles, and I was suggesting a penny for each mile from donors. That would amount to $25 a person upon completion. I looked at firstgiving.com as a source, but I can't see or figure out how to set up a plege based on mileage. I'd like for the ability to have people log on a secure website and using paypal, debit, or credit card make a one time donation, or a per mile pledge and have the site deal with all the legwork. All I'd have to do is come up with the narrative, post it on forums and email it through all of the County departments. This thing could really take off and potentially generate a couple of thousand dollars. I have no idea where to begin, and I'm looking for an easy way to to set this up without having to constantly deal with phonecalls and finances. Anyone have suggestions?

You're on the right track. if you move things through your own accounts, there's a lot of potential snafus.

Is there a way to work with the family directly to set up a paypal that just goes into an account?

Does the dept the officer worked for have a fund already set up to help out the family? You could get with their members and work through that. The police dept I worked for has a police/fire benfit fund that we set up to help out an officer's family after he died of a heart attack and left two young sons. We have done various fundraisers and the funds now makes a donation to the family of local police/fire personnel who have died in service.

I'd start by contacting firstgiving.com and asking if they could add mileage as an option. If they currently have anything that's based upon counting something (laps run, etc..), then I would think it would be trivial for them to add a mileage option. Here's the page for making a request: http://support.firstgiving.com/anonymous_requests/new