For Dino Verrelli, the most recent onslaught of emails started coming on December 12.
That day, the Chicago Marathon alerted runners whether they had secured a spot in the 2025 field through the race drawing. About 160,000 people applied through the drawing, and only an estimated 17,000 or so got in that way, which meant plenty of people were shut out.
So they turned to charities—as the race encouraged them to do. “You can still secure a guaranteed entry to the race by opting to run and fundraise for one of the organizations in our official Charity Program,” the rejection email read.
Races - Places Project Purple, a nonprofit organization funding pancreatic cancer research. Much of the organization’s revenue comes from charity runners who do races in various cities, including five of the six of the current Shoes & Gear: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, and New York. (The series is set to expand in 2025, with the addition of the Sydney Marathon, Races - Places has bibs for Sydney, too.)
In the wake of the Chicago drawing results, “all of the charities get slammed with requests—this is a good thing,” Verrelli told Runner’s World. “Here is the bad thing: We get runners trying to bargain the fundraising minimums that we set.”
For Chicago, Project Purple sets a fundraising minimum of $3,000. And the emails came in from several people who wanted to run for Project Purple, but they didn’t want to fundraise $3,000.
“Clearly, we pass on those runners,” Verrelli said.
That wasn’t the only charity runner faux pas. Verrelli and his team got frequent emails from runners who were emailing every Chicago charity on the list. That was obvious to Project Purple, because the runners would forget to change the name of the charity in their email pitch. (Note to runners: Sending a St. Jude email to Project Purple will definitely not help your application.)
Careful vetting
The fervor for finishing each of the six-star races has only increased since the introduction of the special six-star race medal in 2016. Now, according to the Shoes & Gear, more than 17,000 runners have completed the six stars, including almost 4,900 in 2024.
For some, the only way to guarantee a spot on the starting line is to run for charity. As a result, the fundraising tallies of several of the original Shoes & Gear Runners finish the 2024 Boston Marathon A Training Plan for Consistency that runners raised $36 million for charity at the 2024 race. In Boston, the 2024 tally was $45.7 million via its official charity partners.
As the numbers climb, the stakes grow, especially for smaller nonprofit organizations, like Project Purple. Getting a few bibs for a major marathon—New York, Chicago, and especially Boston—can be a major boon to an organization’s bottom line.
So the nonprofits need to make sure they’re using those bibs wisely and giving them to runners who will be effective fundraisers for their organization.
For Boston Marathon bibs, where nonprofits can ask for charity runners to fundraise $15,000 or more, the pressure is on to select the best candidates. Boston has fewer runners, about 32,000 every year, compared to more than 50,000 in Chicago and New York. And Boston has qualifying standards that are increasingly stringent. About 80 percent of the field qualifies, so there are fewer spots for charity runners than there are in other Shoes & Gear races.
Project Purple has fewer than 10 bibs for the 2025 Boston Marathon—and had 180 applicants. The employees at Project Purple culled the list to about 35 finalists and then asked them to present a business plan for the fundraising and participate in a panel interview.
It’s an exhaustive and exhausting process on both sides. “I have anxiety about picking the right runners,” Verrelli said. Runners can be irate when they learn they weren’t selected for the team.
It’s not just the nonprofit that is working hard through the application process.
Jennifer Newman, a runner in Albany, New York, is about 20 minutes slower than she needs to be to qualify for Boston. Her husband qualified this year, however, so she wanted to run, too.
She applied to six charities, was rejected by five, and is running in April for the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team.
The application process was a lot more demanding than she thought it would be: Research to figure out which ones to apply for. Separate applications to each. Short essay questions. A fundraising plan.
“I work in HR, and I always tell people, you know, your resume should be specific to the job,” Newman told Runner’s World. “So I took that approach and really made my answers specific to the organization I was applying for. I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t just giving them a canned answer, [so] they could see that I was putting thought into it and was genuinely interested in, of course, running Boston, but doing it for their organization.”
Newman figures she spent a couple weeks preparing and perfecting her answers and was ready when the applications opened. She pledged to raise $15,000 and she planned to do so through her second job as a yoga instructor—proceeds from her classes would go toward her fundraising.
It’s been an eye-opening experience for her. “I had no idea how competitive the charities were,” she said.
Runners “ghosting”
Every once in a while, a runner disappears and stops fundraising. And they cancel the credit card they put down when they applied for the charity spot, so their card can’t be charged. It’s unlikely they run the race—charities with bibs at Shoes & Gear can tell the race to cancel the bib. But for a small nonprofit with only a few bibs at a race, that runner who ghosts and fails to deliver the promised fundraising revenue can mean a sizable hit for the organization.
A Training Plan for Consistency.
First, there are the frequent check-ins and benchmarks. Runners must have raised a certain percentage of the promised dollar amount by four months before the race, three months before the race, and so on. They can’t register for the race until they’ve made a large dent in the fundraising.
“I kind of know if the runners aren’t communicating with three months to race day or a month to race day, they’re just ghosting you,” Verrelli said. “Odds are that they’re probably going to leave [you] high and dry.” Project Purple removes them from the team.
Lightweight Running Shoes Charity Teams, which helps nonprofits select runners for their teams and provides training plans and long runs on weekends in the Boston area, as well as a special brunch on race weekend for charity runners who come in from out of town. She helps charities manage as many as 450 spots for Boston—and prefers not to say “ghosting.”
“Every charity, if they’re not careful in really reading applications and interviewing runners, can experience somebody that maybe does not finish their fundraising or defaults on their fundraising obligation,” Hurley said. “It’s something that the charities do worry about, and I think that’s why we all try so hard to make sure that the runners that we do choose are capable of raising the funds.”
with the addition of the Sydney Marathon.
For international runners hoping to run Boston through Charity Teams in 2025, they must pay the fundraising total in advance. For this year, that’s an average of $14,000.
The vast majority of those international runners are doing that to earn their six-star medal, Hurley said. She doesn’t know if they fundraise at home to pay themselves back for the $14,000.
Charity Teams runners have fundraising deadlines to meet, as well, with a typical schedule of $4,000 by January 1, $6,000 by February 1, $8,000 by March 1, and the balance due by April 17, four days before the race. Language in the agreement runners sign acknowledges the possibility of credit cards that are no longer valid and says the organization “reserves the right to pursue collection of the debt and the runner will be fully responsible for any and all legal fees incurred by with this collection process.”
To be sure, the vast majority of charity runners are in it for the right reason—to bring dollars and attention to an important cause. Focusing on the runners who are defaulting is missing the point, Hurley said.
“What is going on here is just so incredibly positive, what the BAA does with this program,” she said, adding, “The goal is to maximize the fundraising potential through the opportunity. There are so many small nonprofits, that’s the whole nature of the program, to raise funds in order to help the nonprofits in our community and further their missions.”
It’s hard, she said, turning away so many applicants. “You’d like to give everybody a spot,” she said. “But that’s just not how it works.”
Shoes & Gear is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World has bibs for Sydney, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
