With Pledge It, Fans Raise Money When Athletes Perform
Anaheim, CA. – June 22, 2014 – Angels Stadium: Mike Trout (27) and Albert Pujols (5) of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim prior to a regular season game
(Photo by Scott Clarke / ESPN Images)
It’s common today for sports teams and individual pro athletes to donate to charities, or even to start up foundations in their own name. It’s less common for athletes to raise money for important causes just by doing the job they get paid often millions to do. That’s the idea behind Pledge It, a donation platform founded and run by Scott Shirley, a former Penn State football player.
Using Pledge It, athletes can start a campaign based on a particular stat – home runs, 3-pointers, assists, sacks — or a significant career milestone. Fans then crowdfund the player’s mission to raise money towards a certain charity based on the athlete’s performance. Los Angeles Angels slugger Albert Pujols was campaigning for the Dominican Republic and families living with Down syndrome as he walloped his way to 600 career round-trippers.
“Through our Pledge It campaigns, we’ve found that 7 of 10 fans choose performance pledging over a flat donation because the pledge is being earned,” Shirley said in a statement. “And our average pledge is nearly twice the national average for online donations.”
Pledge It’s innovative model would seem risky: What happens when a player gets injured and can’t perform, as happened to the Angeles’ Mike Trout — whose fans pledge money per home run — last week? Shirley explained that fans can also make flat donations that aren’t tied to the stat. Often, he said, players will ask their fans to continue pledging or giving while they rehab from the injury. Players also incentivize donations with prizes — Trout’s campaign offers the chance to win a signed baseball bat.
Pledge It, a for-profit company that takes a small cut of each donation, has helped ballplayers raise over $300,000 for a number of charities so far this season. MLB players Adam Wainwright, Liam Hendriks, Colby Rasmus, Andrew Bailey, Carlos Martinez, George Springer, Dee Gordon, Justin Dunn, Gregory Polanco and Brad Ziegler are among the players with campaigns on the platform.
The American Cancer Society and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital are popular charities and have worked with PledgeIt since 2014, the company’s founding year, Shirley said.
According to Shirley, the first Pledge It campaign was started by Devon Still, then a Cincinnati Bengals player and Penn State alumnus, to raise money for his young daughter Leah, who was diagnosed with cancer. The company is the progeny of Uplifting Athletes — currently a nonprofit that partners with college football teams — which Shirley said he began after his Penn State teammates raised money to support rare disease research in light of his father’s diagnosis with such a disease.
“Devon’s campaign was successful and fulfilling on many levels — he was able to earn donations for research with every Bengals’ sack while playing the game he loved, engage football fans in raising awareness of Leah’s triumphant battle, and proved the power of sport for social good!” Shirley wrote in an email.
Shirley also noted that there are more football campaigns in the works for this coming NFL season than there were all of last year.
Now an engine for its unique way of crowdfunding, Pledge It has teams from professional to amateur leagues, as well as individuals, using its platform to get fan support not only for sports, but for worthy causes too.
