I was downtown this weekend and passed by the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  If I had started the race last week, this was probably about the time I would actually have finished.  But the fact that the line was still bright yellow despite a week of traffic rolling over it reminded me that fundraising for a cause doesn’t end at the finish line of the race.

We’re still crunching the numbers here, but it looks like people who raise money online for an event raise about a third of it after the event.  This sounds surprising, but what’s really interesting is that until online fundraising became so common and so easy, paper pledge-based fundraising meant that you collected nearly all of the money after the event.

So if you ran the Boston Marathon to fundraise for a cause, or did any kind of event, you should think seriously about how to get the most fundraising impact in the time following the event.  Here are some tips that are marathon-centric, but could apply to almost any kind of event, even growing or shaving a mustache.

1: Tell everybody how it went:  Be sure to email everybody you know and tell them how the race went.  Tell them what it was like to run the race, what your time was, whatever made it special for you.  If you blog, be sure to blog about the event.  If you did a training blog, you don’t have to shut it down, keep blogging about your post-race life.

2: Ask again:  Remind people that you ran for a cause and want to raise money for that cause even after the race.  Tell new people who might not have received your initial messages before the race.  Maybe you met people at the race or race events who are your new friends and contacts, tell them too!

3: Set a higher bar for next year and start now:  As soon as you are comfortable deciding if you’re going to do it again – or if you’re going to do something different – for the same cause or a different one, start the process.  Blog.  Email.  Recruit a team.

In short, the causes we believe in have long time horizons – curing a disease, helping the handicapped, saving animals, serving humanity – and raising money for them is a constant need.  Doing it online can amplify your effort, so every little thing you do can have great impact.