Do you want to know how Charity Hop got started? I’m Brett Rudy, one of the two co-founders of the company. Since the mid-1990’s, I helped run marketing and events for the Boston Men’s Baseball League - the largest amateur baseball league in New England. In 2002, while managing the Boston White Sox in that league, I drafted a young second baseman out of my alma mater, Northeastern University, named Mike Lembo. Mike and I both shared a passion for baseball and marketing and collectively did what we could to grow league events philanthropically. We created an annual fundraiser with legendary pitcher Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox in 2004 called 100 Innings of Baseball. It was the longest baseball game ever - 33 straight hours over 101 innings - and raised $112,000 for Curt’s Pitch for ALS, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease. The Red Sox won the World Series, and the event inspired us to launch Charity Hop Sports Marketing. The name integrates the word “charity,” and also doubles in baseball-terms meaning an “easy ground ball.” Thus, Charity Hop makes your fundraising easy.
At first, we merely built a website. Within a week, we were contacted by Charity Wines looking for us to help them put professional baseball players on wine bottles. We sold 800,000 bottles in the Boston area and raised $1 million for charity that first year.
Over the years, we’ve grown from a couple of amateur baseball players offering charitable consulting to adding sports & entertainment marketing, product development & deployment, event planning & implementation, and public relations & talent procurement to our service offering. We’ve worked with more than 30 professional athletes across Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League in a dozen markets, including many Hall of Famers. We’ve worked with Academy Award winning movie stars, household name national brands, and some of the most worthy charitable causes in country.
On this blog, we’ll share our stories. You may find interesting, and may even learn a thing or two. We hope you find them inspiring. Sports and marketing are our passion. And if you share the passion, follow along and join the conversation. We’re Charity Hop Sports Marketing. Thanks for reading our first blog posting.
