Steve Waugh Foundation: THE RIDERLESS BIKE

Campaign and Content Design, Experiential, Public Relations, Social

The challenge

The Captain’s Ride is a challenging charity cycling event for the Steve Waugh Foundation (SWF), raising funds for the 400,000 children throughout Australia affected by rare diseases. Sporting legend Steve Waugh AO would lead a group of 62 experienced riders on an enormous six-day 701km event from Mittagong to the peak of Mt Kosciuszko. The children he supports are unable to participate, so he challenged us to make them feel part of the ride by creating something inspiring and extraordinary with a creative PR and social campaign.

The solution

The ‘Riderless Bike’ is a world-first self-propelled bike that would follow the peloton from the rear, representing the children the ride was raising funds for. We collaborated with a number of technology partners and creative designers to undertake the huge challenge of engineering the bike. We also had to navigate approvals from the RTA, NSW Police, local councils and insurers.

We created a dedicated web page (www.captainsride.com) for public donations, offering a first-person viewpoint of the ride from the Riderless Bike. People could sponsor the Riderless Bike for part of the route, and be notified as it passed through their section.

We used celebrities taking part in the ride to spruik media and get people on-board via their social followings, and our technology partner, Finch, to explain how the tech worked.

The results

552

552 media clips, 90% contained an image of the ride

100%

100% of stories contained our call to action

190M+

190M+ reach

150%

Website traffic up 150% on previous year

$1M

Raised $1M for children with rare diseases

7%

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