Building a better ride: with AIDS ride organizer Pallotta TeamWorks out of business, many AIDS groups are pinning their financial hopes on their own smaller rides. (Fund-Raising).

It's hard to know which came first: people's passion for huge, multiday AIDS fund-raisers or the grandfather of those fund-raisers, the AIDS rides. But by last August two things had become abundantly clear: People's interest in these events had waned, and--with the financial collapse of AIDS ride organizer Pallotta TeamWorks--AIDS service organizations were going to have to scramble to find new ways to raise the millions of dollars once generated by the popular rides.

Dan Pallotta's genius, according to AIDS group officials, was to devise and brilliantly market fund-raising events in which participants enlisted friends, family, and coworkers to donate to a cause they might have never before considered. Riders became "a whole legion of volunteers to raise money for us," says A. Cornelius Baker, executive director of Washington, D.C.'s Whitman-Walker Clinic.

Problems arose not from the events themselves, activists say, but from publicity and news reports about Pallotta TeamWorks's expenses and high price for producing the events--in at least one case eating up more than 90% of contributions. By 2001 that publicity got so bad that beneficiaries started to leave TeamWorks-organized events. Some riders also became disenchanted when organizers, they say, shifted the rides' focus to the event rather than to the cause at hand, HIV and AIDS. TeamWorks shut down three months after the Avon Foundation decided in May against retaining the firm to produce its 2003 breast cancer walks, when a hoped-for replacement for Avon bowed out.

In fact, TeamWorks's closure in itself isn't that big of a financial blow to AIDS groups, since so many of them had already severed ties or considered distancing themselves from the company. What could hurt, however, is trying to change fund-raising game plans during the deepest economic recession in decades.

Fund-raising was going to be tough in 2003 regardless of whether TeamWorks was there to help. AIDS groups are appealing for individual, corporate, and foundation donations following a stock market nosedive and in a stagnant economy. They find themselves competing with a growing number of other health causes for a shrinking number of private dollars. And as pressing news about domestic AIDS concerns takes a backseat to international AIDS issues, U.S. AIDS groups have to work harder than ever to convince potential donors that AIDS needs remain urgent. "AIDS is devastating Africa so much more than locally that when people think of HIV and AIDS, they don't think of next door," explains Kendall Farrell, executive director of Vermont CARES.

Private money will become even more crucial, many community health officials believe, because public funds likely will decline: State and local governments are financially strapped, and the Bush administration wants to cut outlays for social services.

Yet as these AIDS groups prepare for what promises to be one of the toughest fund-raising years yet, most of them are relying on revamped, TeamWorks-free AIDS rides to keep their doors open rather than attempting to reinvent the cash-cow formula. At the same time, they're hoping a more modest, back-to-basics approach will not only be more cost-effective but also bring back donors alienated by TeamWorks's for-profit marketing.

For example, Bob Power, executive director of south-central Wisconsin's AIDS Network, notes that his group as well as others in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota announced they were ending their participation in the Heartland AIDS Ride even before TeamWorks folded. Power says officials from the network, which received $260,000 from the Heartland AIDS Ride over five years, decided to launch their own ride so that they could have "a charity event that focuses on the charity and not the event--that refocuses attention on AIDS."

AIDS Network is primarily using volunteers to produce its own ride next summer, which is planned to be smaller, shorter in distance, and less costly. The network also will sponsor its usual range of events--a black-tie dinner, a variety show, and an AIDS walk, which also saw a decline in contributions this past year. "I'm always asked, `Can't someone just write out a check directly to the agency?'" Power says. "But I think [contributors] need something to be a part, of to make that donation seem worthwhile."

In Chicago, where a local consortium of AIDS groups received $7.5 million from the Heartland AIDS Ride over seven years, that consortium, AIDSCycle Inc., is now planning a smaller ride for 2003 that will reach out to former donors, especially gays turned off by "all the negative publicity about Pallotta," says AIDSCycle Inc. president Courtney Reid.

Similarly, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation are proceeding cautiously with their second AIDS/LifeCycle ride. After breaking with TeamWorks in 2001, the center and the foundation organized their own ride, which competed last spring with TeamWorks's California AIDS Ride. The $1.6 million net return was about 75% less than the amount garnered by the California AIDS Ride. Now the agencies are setting more conservative goals, says center interim director Rebecca Isaacs. The key, she says, is boosting the number of riders.

It is up to the AIDS organizations to portray the urgency of HIV-related needs, Isaacs says. One way to do this, she maintains, is with the "back-to-basics" approach the center used at its annual fund-raising dinner in November. Center officials spoke simply about "the people we serve and what we do," she says. "We didn't try to make it glamorous. We sometimes have glitzier events, but people were really touched [by the basic approach]."

In Washington, D.C., the two AIDS groups that benefited from the TeamWorks-produced AIDS rides--and received $15.7 million in proceeds over seven years--are going in two different directions.

Whitman-Walker dropped the ride to reinvest its resources in other fund-raising, such as corporate giving, major donors, and planned gifts and bequests, says Baker. A major problem with the AIDS ride, he says, was that Whitman-Walker had to put out money in advance to pay the event's costs. "That meant tying up a lot of capital," he says. "We thought it was best for us to put those funds into new areas [of fund-raising] where we felt we needed to see growth in the future to sustain our work."

But the other beneficiary, Food and Mends, decided to launch a new cycling event, together with two other groups from Virginia and North Carolina. Executive director Craig Shniderman says Food and Friends learned a lot "about producing a successful ride" in the TeamWorks years and "felt we could do this independenfiy."

Shniderman asserts there is no donor fatigue among gays: "At least in our experience, the gay and lesbian community has remained stead-fastly devoted to funding for this epidemic even though that epidemic is predominantly impacting outside that community."

Michael Weinstein, president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation and a longtime critic of TeamWorks, questions whether revamped AIDS rides can succeed. "There must be a more viable long-term fund-raising strategy than relying on events that each year have to be more fabulous than the last," he says. "We have to try to get people to give for the sake of giving. That's not easy, but neither are events."

Ben McConnell, a Chicago marketing consultant studied Pallota TeamWorks, that whatever AIDS service organizations do, they must invest in "quality marketing" to target donors, just as businesses target customers.

"What a lot of nonprofits can learn from the Pallotta model is that directing additional dollars into quality marketing will most certainly produce more revenue," McConnell says. "To raise more dollars you have to raise awareness about what contributions will do for the cause." Donors won't be put off if AIDS groups level with them, he says.

Terje Anderson, executive director of the National Association of People With AIDS, agrees that hard times or not, AIDS groups will have to be more creative in this post-Pallotta TeamWorks era. "The organizations that are going to survive and effectively provide services," he says, "are going to be the ones that figure out ways to market themselves to new private donors and, at the same time, successfully keep their old donor base."

Freiberg has also written for the New York Post and the Washington Blade.