By Sheldon Spackman

Athletics Leadership Fund

Text-to-donate campaign raises thousands for RDC Athletes

Apr 3, 2019 | 1:56 PM

Officials with the Red Deer College Foundation are celebrating the success of their inaugural social media fundraiser aimed at supporting RDC’s student athletes.

Campaign spokesperson Jasmine Nelson says the “30INTHEBANK” campaign held on March 29 has raised well over $6,000 to go towards athletics scholarships.

“Every year we try and raise $30,000 for the Athletics Leadership Fund which is a fund that supports our RDC student athlete scholarships, as well as offset some of the participation costs for our students,” says Nelson. “So every year we hold the Athletics Scholarship Breakfast to raise this money and we wanted to give some of our other community members the opportunity to be a part of that fundraising campaign. Tickets to the Athletics Scholarship Breakfast are $100 but we price-out a few people in our community by having tickets at $100.”

Nelson says the text-to-donate fundraiser allows everyone to contribute.

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“We incorporated a mobile giving number, so by texting 30INTHEBANK TO 45678, you can contribute $5, $10 of $20 to the Athletics Leadership Fund,” she explains. “Then we also incorporated the online giving page at rdc.ab.ca/30INTHEBANK for people who wanted to give a little bit more and still be a part of it. With the whole crowd that gathered to support student athlete scholarships, we ended up raising $2,020 through crowd funding alone.”

In addition, Nelson points-out four local pubs that donated one dollar to the cause from every pint sold on Mar. 29.

“All told, we raised over $3,000 just with those partners and with our crowd funding. Then Nexus Energy Technologies stepped up to match all donations we received up to $30,000… so our total is well over $6,000 at this point.”

Nelson says the 30INTHEBANK campaign helps bring the story of RDC’s student athlete scholarship program to the community.

“A lot of our student athletes recorded videos telling our supporters how the scholarships that they’ve received have impacted their journey as a student and as an athlete,” she explains. “That was really impactful to be able to share those individual stories with people and those are all still up on our twitter if anybody wants to scroll back through them.”

Nelson says the community’s support for the 30INTHEBANK campaign has been nothing short of amazing.

“We’ve been blown away by the numbers, we’ve been blown away by the support of the local businesses that have stepped up,” she proclaims. “We really want to make sure that our athletics program is sustainable because it does have such great value for our student athletes. Red Deer College has touched just about everybody in our region, if you didn’t go to school here you know someone who did, so it’s been really cool to sort of bring that community spirit together and gather around our student athletes and help support them to become the future leaders in our region.”

Nelson says a handful of tickets are still available for the RDC Athletics Scholarship Breakfast.

This year’s event is taking place at the Pidherney Curling Centre on April 9 and features Olympic curler and Olympic silver medalist Cheryl Bernard as the special guest speaker.