We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Crosby. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer below.

Jennifer, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I laid the ground for starting my non-profit race directing business unaware that I was laying the ground for starting my non-profit race directing business. Several things culminated – seemingly all at once! 1. My son was just starting elementary school and I was frustrated the fundraisers in preschool and elementary school were food-based. 2. My husband, son, and I had been running for several years at foot races in Central Texas. 3. I signed up to help with the PTA’s second 5K — a non-food-based fundraiser, ended up being named the race director (the PTA team was so unified and motivated to work together for a successful event), and had a blast! I got to mold the race into the best of the races my family had experienced over the years. I assumed it’d me my one time thing to help with at the school. Soon, our neighborhood asked if I would direct its races. 4. Some of the PTA members and I were discussing how we should help other schools and small organizations put more emphasis on fitness. so we started a fitness club and shared how to do that with other schools. 5. We realized we were able to get sponsors for activities by using the PTA’s 501c3 status and knew our kids would be moving on to middle school soon. 6. I read an article based on a study in our community about how children in our community were in the top percentage of our state for obesity and people were not exercising because they couldn’t afford to join a gym, and they didn’t know where to walk or run safely around town. That’s when I decided to see if I could start a non-profit with the sole purpose of encouraging people to get off the couch and run or walk in their communities. I wanted to have safe, family-friendly, fitness activities that were little to no cost to participants to show that fitness can be as easy as walking out the front door. I wasn’t really sure if it would work, but I thought if we could get a couple of schools excited about the idea of fitness clubs (evening, once a week, invite whole families), we’d be making an impact in our community.
I never imagined we would become a non-profit race directing business made up entirely of volunteers – all with full time jobs outside of this organization. We started in 2013 with 3 races that year, and now we direct over 30!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

We just want to get people off the couch. That’s it. We organize, direct, and promote opportunities for families and individuals to make small steps in setting and reaching fitness goals. Through community events and weekly fitness activities, this corporation’s goal is to encourage people to get off the couch. This concerted effort will result in reducing the obesity rate in our county – or anywhere.

Focus is placed on finding ways to encourage participation from all socio-economic levels and all age-levels by reducing the entry fees through donations and by providing free opportunities for consistent fitness activities.

We do not charge for what we do, we are completely driven by donations. This means, we are able to help the smallest of organizations put on community, fitness-based events.

We also lead 3 run groups and 3 walk groups every week in the Austin area and we work diligently to build relationships with our friends, neighbors, and soon-to-be-friends, to be consistent in exercise for the betterment of our community’s overall health.

We’ve been able to do some pretty cool things: running on a runway at an airport, running on a car race track, running on a farm, running on a cattle ranch, being the first event of a brand new school, taking on continuing legacies of long-held racing events.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The pandemic taught us a lot about who we really are and how we are viewed in the community. We were extremely grateful for the network of trust we had built with officials as it made it easier to get them to take us seriously when we were ready to bring in-person racing back safely. We researched, consulted with medical professionals, made new protocol, and ultimately only held a few races completely virtual. We also learned that we have become a meeting place for people – and when the pandemic threatened to take that we had to step up reaching out to individuals to check on them. This made me very proud!

How did you build your audience on social media?

We are a non-profit – run completely by volunteers – and social media and marketing took a back seat to the daily operations of producing race after race. A long-time friend of mine asked what he and his family could do to help our organization. I told him, post about our races on social media and clean up our website. Lucky for us, his family did! They have created an entire marketing group and we have seen an increase in race participation. Increase in participation ties directly into our mission for our 501c3 status, but it also means the race is paid for by economy of scale and the sponsorships collected by host organizations can be fully used for the cause.

RunRise is made up of mostly junior high and high school students who work with our marketing director on a weekly basis.
We are most successful because of the work RunRise Media has done to develop relationships with our regular attenders and they have been consistent. We truly love the participants who come to our run groups, walk groups, and fitness activities and RunRise makes sure they know it! We stay on message with that – the constant encourager!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fortheloveofgo.com/calendar
• Instagram: for_the_love_of_go
• Facebook: facebook.com/fortheloveofgo
• Twitter: igotoffthecouch

Image Credits
n/a