The World Swim Against Malaria is our original awareness and fundraising activity, but its success has lead to other organisations and individuals approaching us, looking to incorporate their own fundraising ideas into our infrastructure. This is something we are very happy to accommodate. One such initiative is Madness Against Malaria, which ran a very successful campaign in 2007 and is about to launch the final stages of its 2008 competition.
Madness Against Malaria was set up in the US by Lance Laifer (you can read this NY Times piece for more information on Lance and the Madness initiative). It is a competitive fundraising competition, loosely based on the popular March Madness NCCA Basketball competition. The idea is that you enter a team and see how much money you can raise, during a qualifying period, using the sponsorship page you create on the Madness website. When qualifying ends (14 March 2008 for this year) the top 64 teams go into a series of knock-out rounds where they compete, one-on-one over a two week period, to see how much money they raise. During these early rounds you can have some unlikely pairings - for example a primary school could be drawn against an investment bank.
It is a game of strategy because if you raise all your money too early you may exhaust your ability to compete in the knock-out stages.
Currently, there are 73 teams battling it out to qualify for the knock-out stages - which will be drawn on 14 March. (Check-out the teams here).
It's not too late to enter, especially since you do not necessarily need to have raised a great deal of money to get through to the knock-out stages, which is when the fun really starts.
We will keep you up-to-speed with the highlights once the knock-out rounds begin.