Crafting your own virtual charity sport event: Emotional energy,rituals,digital intimacy and the benefits of inclusivity

Abstract

COVID-19 created a global sporting standstill for mega-events like the Olympics and had a similarly profound impact on small and local events such as charity sport events. These events were forced to pivot to virtual offerings to continue to deliver the event experience and impacts, including critical fundraising outcomes. This paper uses semi-structured interviews with participants in Cancer Council Tasmania's first virtual Women's 5 km walk/run (W5K) event to examine the ways that people make, stage, and experience a virtual charity sport event. The current research captures the creative labours, interaction rituals and digital practices participants used to craft their own do-it-yourself virtual event and the practical and inclusive benefits they afforded. Extending Randall Collins’ theory of interactional rituals with social shaping of technology and ‘digital intimacy’ perspectives, the paper argues that the virtual W5K produced a different but not diminished form of ‘emotional energy’ that allowed participants to stage their own ‘micro’ events, produce a meaningful experience and make visible morally worthy charitable subjectivities. This research contributes to the sociology of sport by building an understanding of how the pandemic impacted small and community sports events and adapting Collins’ theory to recognise digitally mediated sports events as powerful generators of emotional energy.

Keywords

charity sport fitness philanthropy emotions rituals digital intimacy social media inclusivity

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted the staging of mega and major sporting events, but also smaller-scale and local events. Considerable sociological attention has been given to how the pandemic crisis created a sporting ‘standstill’ (Lee Ludvigsen, 2022) for large-scale events like the 2020 Summer Olympics and the Euro 2020 in football, yet less is known about the impacts on smaller, local, and community-based sports events. The research that has been done on the ‘virtualisation’ of smaller sporting events in response to lockdown measures (Bunds et al., 2023; Chen et al. 2023; Svensson and Radmann, 2023; Westmattelmann et al., 2021) is mostly organisational, performance or community-focused, and is less focused on capturing participants’ experiences. This paper addresses this sociological gap by focusing on people's experiences of participating and fundraising in a virtual ‘fitness philanthropy’ (FP) event in the context of COVID-19 restrictions.

FP describes a movement that mobilises charity endeavours through mass participation sporting events such as fun runs, bike rides or multi-sport challenges (Palmer and Dwyer, 2019). Emerging in the USA in the 1980s, FP is used by individuals, charities and corporate sponsors to acquire donors and fundraisers to support multiple social and health causes. It represents a multiple-billion-dollar philanthropic sector (Palmer et al., 2021). In-person FP events involve collective bodily displays undertaken in a shared physical space, such as closed-off city streets, roads and parks, generating a shared communal and moral experience (Palmer et al., 2021). FB events have been shown to generate a ‘collective warmth’ (Maffesoli, 1996) based on shared connection to an emotionally and morally charged experience to remember, celebrate and ‘make a difference’ (Palmer et al., 2021).

There are two key social and cultural drivers of FP. The first is the emergence of ‘embodied philanthropy’ where participants use their bodies as expressive tools to raise funds and awareness for charitable causes (Robert, 2018). The second is shifts towards ‘healthism’ and ‘neoliberalism’ which see health and social problems devolved from the state to individualised, self-responsible and privatised ‘charitable bodies’ (Nettleton and Hardey, 2006). FP events connect the mass spectacle of ‘collective bodywork’ (Wiltshire et al., 2018) with the powerful emotions of social connection and giving articulated and shared through embodied displays of physical effort and endurance (Wade et al., 2022). Palmer et al. (2021) research provides a comprehensive sociological examination of the history, characteristics and significance of the FP movement.

From shared streets to digital spaces: ‘lockdown leisure’ and the digitisation of fitness philanthropy

Although digital elements were features of charity sport events pre-pandemic (e.g. social media use to solicit donations, broadcast ‘good works’), events were forced to pivot to fully virtual offerings to enable events to continue and retain critical fundraising sources, especially at a time where demands on charitable services were acute due to social and economic need (Van Steenburg et al., 2022). The virtualisation of charity sport events in response to the pandemic is a unique example of ‘lockdown leisure’ (Lee Ludvigsen et al., 2023), a concept which highlights how the pandemic reconfigured everyday leisure practices and spaces and intensified its digitisation. As Lee Ludvigsen et al. (2023:3) point out, lockdown measures did not simply translate to the absence of leisure activities, but also their transformation by individuals, groups and stakeholders. While COVID-19 was a driving force behind the pivot to virtual charity sport event offerings, additional factors, including extreme weather and the ability to engage as many participants as possible, suggest that virtual and hybrid (i.e. both in-person and virtual offerings) events will remain (Chen et al., 2024).

A key sociological question, then, is how do people create and experience participating and fundraising in FP events when they ‘go online’ and lose the ‘emotional energy’ of face-to-face events? Typically, ‘virtual’ events are undertaken in the streets, parks, tracks and trails of local areas and neighbourhoods. Instead of a centralised event space where participants are physically co-present, virtual event participants rely on a digital assemblage of smartphones, websites, wearable technologies and social media to share and record their progress and submit their results to event organisers. Established FP event rituals such as completion medals given at the finish line or the purchase of finisher T-shirts are supplanted with virtual finishers being sent, for example, a medal in the mail (sometimes before they have completed the event) and given options to purchase merchandise such as commemorative finisher T-shirts. Training progress, fundraising goals and event participation are typically posted to a participant's social media and integrated to a centralised event website, dashboard or ‘app’ displaying indicators such as total money raised for charity, numbers of fundraisers and donors, donation feeds and lists of ‘top’ fundraisers.

Although there is a developing scholarship that details the sociological drivers and consequences of the rise of sports charity events (Palmer et al., 2021), there is an absence of research on how people understand and experience participating and fundraising in digitally mediated charity sport events when they lose their characteristic ‘collective bodywork’ and affective spectacle. These questions were pressing during the pandemic but also remain relevant, as many sports charity events now provide virtual events to complement traditional face-to-face participation modes. Drawing on qualitative interviews with participants in Cancer Council Tasmania's Annual Women's 5K walk/run (W5K), a small-scale running-based sport charity event, this research examines the creative ways people make, stage and experience their own sports charity event.

The W5K is a community FP event that takes place annually through the Central Business District (CBE) of Launceston, a regional city in Tasmania, Australia, and typically attracts over 2000 in-person participants. While titled the Women's 5K walk/run, the event is promoted as supporting and encouraging health awareness for all Tasmanians and links to Cancer Council Tasmania's mission to reduce the impact of cancer on all Tasmanians. Most registrants are women despite organisational attempts to market the event more broadly to men. It is Cancer Council Tasmania's major annual fundraiser. In 2020, the event became a solely virtual event, due to the pandemic, with the decreased (and prohibited) movement of people between Australian states affecting the viability of an in-person event offering. Cancer Council received 798 registrations for the 2020 virtual event and raised over AUD $120,000. The current research extends Collins’ (2016) concept of interaction rituals with ideas from social shaping of technology and ‘intimate publics’ (Berlant, 2008) perspectives, to analyse how participants in the W5K staged their own ‘micro’ virtual event to produce a distinct but still meaningful and engaging charity experience.

In the absence of face-to-face: theorising digital sports charity events as interaction rituals

This research uses charity sport events as a case study to apply the concept of interaction rituals to virtual or technology-mediated events. Drawing on the sociology of micro-interactions pioneered by Erving Goffman (1982), interaction ritual theory is commonly associated with the work of Randall Collins (2004, 2020a, 2020b). As coined by Collins (2016), an interaction ritual is a focused encounter that reproduces community and gives people a sense of belonging, meaning and vitality. Face-to-face mass participation events such as festivals and large-scale sporting events have been theorised as sites of interaction rituals (Collins, 2016) that require ‘bodily copresence’; the assembly of people in the same physical place in order for participants to generate meaning. Face-to-face encounters are considered essential building blocks for social connection, community building and identity construction (Spenger et al., 2023).

Collins’ interaction ritual theory is based on the premise that interaction ritual chains are the basic building blocks of social reality, producing emotional energy and generating overall solidarity (Božić, 2021). There are three key dimensions to Collins’ interaction theory. First, is the generation of ‘emotional energy’ that relate to feelings of ‘confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action’ (Collins, 2004: 49). Second, is the role of ‘group symbols’, which include actions, artefacts, emblems, jargon, people, places, slang, or other symbolic carrier, which via processes of ‘collective effervescence’ become markers of group membership. Third, is the requirement of ‘bodily copresence’, where people are assembled collectively in the same physical place.

Collins built on Goffman's work on small-scale, informal and secular encounters in everyday life to focus on the mundane and micro interactions that characterise social life. Along with megachurch services (Wellman et al., 2014), start-up accelerators (Krishnan et al., 2021), and restorative justice hearings (Rossner, 2011), interaction ritual theory has been applied to studies of sport and leisure including football games (Hill et al., 2021), sports fandom (Cottingham, 2012) and sports development (Spaaij and Schaillée, 2021). Collins (2016) himself has applied his framework to understanding violence in sport. While interaction theory allows for ‘ritual failure’ where there is no collective effervescence, group solidarity or group symbols, the key suggestion is that failure occurs when there is no bodily copresence. Here, Collins argues that technology-based rituals lack social and symbolic power (2020c). For Collins, technology can provide ‘some of the sense of shared attention and emotion; while insisting that ‘the strongest effects are reserved […] for full bodily assembly’ (Collins, 2004: 60). This research adds to the broader range of phenomena to which interaction ritual theory applies through investigation of the Women's 5 km, examining if, and how, the W5K may generate ‘collective effervescence’ in the absence of bodily copresence.

Beyond digital affective inferiority: sports charity, belonging and digital intimate publics

Yet, even prior to the pandemic, technology-mediated interaction was common, and there is an evidence base that provides a set of clues for thinking about how digital technologies will shape collective experiences such as the virtual W5K. Virtual communities, social media and digital dating, for example, are all forms of technology-mediated interactions through which concepts of solidarity, morality and community can be shared and expressed (Ling, 2008, 2014; Nexø and Strandell, 2020; van Haperen et al., 2020). In contrast to Collins’ perspective, digital interactions can, in fact, make it easier for people with shared values to connect with one another (Johannessen, 2023) and create virtual or digital forms of ‘neotribalism’ (Maffesoli, 1996). Drawing on classical sociological and anthropological perspectives, rituals, whether online or offline, involve shared practices, symbolic objects, and a sense of collective identity (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]; Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960). These elements can be reconfigured and expressed through digital media. As Dimaggio et al. (2018: 82) et al. argue, face-to-face interactions should be seen as ‘special (albeit especially important) cases of the broader range of phenomena to which interaction ritual theory applies’. Similarly, Božić's (2021) research showed that while pandemic responses such as lockdowns, distancing and isolation measures had a significant impact on leisure rituals during the pandemic crisis, the main dimensions of interaction rituals can be maintained online or without physical co-presence.

Certainly, there are emerging concerns that post-pandemic life has increased feelings of loneliness and isolation as more people work and study online, social networks shrink, and digital technologies undermine face-to-face life experiences (Patulny and Bower, 2022; Elbogen et al., 2022). However, this research proposes the need for a ‘critically optimistic’ sociology (Holmes, 2016) that acknowledges risks such as diminished social connection but also spotlights the creative ways in which people generate new forms of meaning and ‘affective’ belonging using digital technologies. Collins’ perspective on the affective inferiority of digital interactions reflects how virtual intimacies – digital intimate publics – are often constructed as ‘diminished and dangerous corruption[s] of the real thing’ (Mclotten, 2013:7 cited in Dobson et al., 2018: 5). The intensification of digital interaction may be changing profiles of social connection post-pandemic, but it is also important to resist technological deterministic accounts which solely position ‘technology’ as ‘doing’ things to humans and emotions on its own terms (Baym, 2015). To this end, this paper approaches digital FP events through a social shaping of technology approach that frames technology, belonging and affective bonding as a relational process between users and technologies (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999). As broader sociological studies of technology suggest, there is a need to draw attention to the social nature of interactions and emotions with technology rather than assuming that technology drives all human activity and feeling. This perspective is missing in Collins’ interaction rituals approach, which arguably gives technology too much power in transforming emotions, treats technology as autonomous, ignores the social and cultural dimensions of technology use and is premised on an online/offline binary. We are critical of approaches that conceptualise digital technologies as distinct meeting spaces that oppose, or even replace, tradition interaction orders. Here, we draw upon ‘intimate publics’ (Berlant, 2008) as a framework for analysing digital experiences of participating and fundraising in charity sports events highlighting the meanings of intimate affect, bodies and expressions of caring and giving in public social media contexts (Berlant, 2008; Dobson et al., 2018). The key research question guiding this paper is how people make, craft and stage their own do-it-yourself mass participation charity sport event.

Methods

The research involved a qualitative analysis of 13 semi-structured interviews with participants in the virtual W5K. Researchers approached this study as sociologists with expertise in sport, digital culture and qualitative methods. None of the researchers is affiliated with Cancer Council Tasmania, but the lead author lives locally and participated in the virtual event with his partner. The interviews formed the second stage of a larger multi-method survey-interview project examining participants’ motivations and experiences participating in the virtual 5 km event. Interviewees were recruited via the stage 1 survey (N = 96) that had been shared by Cancer Council Tasmania with all W5K registrants aged 18 and over. After completing the survey, participants were invited to participate in a follow-up 1-h interview to deepen knowledge about their experiences participating in and fundraising in the virtual event. Each member of the research team was assigned a list of interviewees to contact and interview. The interview guide was developed through a detailed reading of existing literature related to sports charity, interaction rituals, digital technologies and sport. The interview guide provided ‘theoretical sensitivity’ (Corbin and Strauss, 1990: 41), enabling further development of existing concepts and theories from the literature that could be modified and refined once interviewing commenced. Interviewees were asked about their motivations for participating and fundraising, experiences of preparing for and taking part in the virtual fundraising event, how they used social media as part of the event and their general health and wellbeing.

Interviews were conducted via Zoom and lasted approximately 1 h. Interviewees were all of Anglo-Australian ethnicity, and the age range was 32–75. The sample included 12 women and one man. The concentration of women in the sample reflects the wider concentration of female registrants in the Women's 5 km, although the event is open to all genders. Interview participants had varying levels of physical fitness (from very active to not very active) but the majority reported being ‘quite active’, most held post-compulsory educational qualifications and were or had been employed in predominantly education or health settings.

Most interviewees had taken part in previous charity sports events (including the in-person Women's 5K for Cancer Council Tasmania). Only one participant had participated in a virtual format previously. All interviewees were given $50 gift cards in recognition of their participation. In-depth interviews were recorded using Zoom and imported into the qualitative software analysis tool Dovetail. Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was undertaken to construct themes and patterns related to experiences of participating and fundraising in the virtual W5K. Thematic analysis was undertaken collaboratively with Dovetail, enabling uploading and transcription of Zoom interviews but also shared coding, checking and analysis within a single secure platform. Following Braun and Clarke's (2006) six steps to conduct thematic analysis, the research team: (1) familiarised ourselves with the data by reading and re-reading the transcripts, (2) generated an initial coding framework through analysis within and across cases, (3) developed codes into themes, (4) revised themes in relation to codes, quotes and the whole dataset, (5) refined the themes and (6) reported results using exemplar cases and quotations.

Data analysis was non-linear with themes iteratively constructed and refined as interviewing and analysis progressed (Minichiello et al., 1995). Codes formed both deductively, based on existing empirical and theoretical literature, and inductively as they were developed from the data (Willis, 2019). Deductive analysis centred on theoretical ideas related to digital interaction rituals and the experiential aspects of fundraising for and participation in fitness philanthropy events identified in previous literature, whereas our inductive analysis allowed for new themes and connections to be developed from the data analysed. This approach enabled us to construct a sociological analysis attuned to theoretical insights about sports, technological-mediated interaction rituals and fitness philanthropy while giving credence to patterns and themes developed from the data itself. Participants’ identities have been protected with the use of pseudonyms throughout.

Findings and discussion

‘Not the same kind of buzz’: emotional energy and missing the ‘sea of pink’

Many participants evaluated their virtual participation through the lens of missing the collective emotional energy of the face-to-face experience. Most of the sample had participated previously in the W5K and reflected on how the virtual experience felt emotionally different, if not diminished, in comparison. Providing partial support for Collins’ (2004) theory, the absence of ‘bodily assembly’ meant the virtual W5K lacked the ‘emotional energy’ or ‘collective effervescence’ of the in-person event, with participants evaluating the virtual experience as lacking the ‘same kind of buzz’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘fun’ and ‘power’. For example, Sandra said: ‘I probably didn’t like it [the virtual format] as much cause it was fun going to City Park and the atmosphere and walking with lots of people’ while Emily said ‘it doesn’t quite compare to City Park, where you have this sea of pink running through the city stress, that, to me, is so powerful, that image’.

Emily's reference to missing the ‘sea of pink’ was a common refrain across participants. The ‘sea of pink’ refers to the image of thousands of pink-adorned W5K participants walking or running through the CBD of Launceston. Reflecting trends towards the ‘pinkification’ of women's cancer philanthropy, the W5K actively encourages participants to wear pink in fun and creative ways, and pink is critical to the branding and marketing of the event. King (2008) defines ‘pinkification’ as the cultural emphasis on pink as a dominant colour and symbol in fundraising and awareness campaigns for women's health issues, particularly breast cancer.

Common references in interviews to ‘missing’ or ‘losing’ the ‘sea of pink’ illustrated feelings that the online event lacked the same emotional and social vitality and joy of the face-to-face experience. Greg and Evelyn, for example, said: ‘obviously it was a shame that the event couldn’t go ahead with the massive sea of pink you see through the CBD’; ‘some people aren't into having lots of people around, but I do think the value of seeing the streets covered in pink is a big part of it too’. Zoe exemplified the tensions virtual participants felt between the benefits of the virtual event and missing the spectacle of ‘pink everywhere’:

Well, when you went to an event [prior to Covid] … there was pink everywhere, and there was people everywhere and you knew they were all there for the same reason as you was. And it was so motivating and inspiring … but it was different. It wasn't, it wasn't the same … being able to do it virtually was fantastic. I could do it where I was and pick my time. But the actual feeling of the two was polar opposite, there's nothing like being at an event and seeing all those people and knowing that every one of them has a story that connects them. That's just very motivating. (Zoe)

While Zoe's story captured some of the perceived benefits of virtual participation – particularly the flexibility of time and location – it is also indicative of how many participants felt the virtual event generated a weaker form of ‘shared attention and emotion’ (Collins, 2004: 60). Without the collective ‘bodily assembly’ and display of pink ‘group symbols’, some participants experienced the virtual event as producing a diminished or lower degree of emotional exchange and ‘collective effervescence’ (Maffesoli, 1996; Collins, 2004). This attenuated emotional energy was explained due to the absence of bodily copresence, reduced feelings of community and losing the affective spectacle of the ‘sea of pink’. Others also noted that the virtual W5K event lost its capacity as a ‘place of encounter’ (Spenger et al., 2023). Some interviewees reflected how they missed structured opportunities to ‘bump into others’ – to create incidental and ‘weak’ social ties. For example, Evelyn declared: ‘I must admit I enjoy [the in-person format] … Launceston is a very small place … you’re inevitably bumping into people that you wouldn’t have bumped into. So it's actually a great social event as well’. While participants’ accounts provided broad support for Collins’ (2004) position that technology can provide elements of ‘shared attention and emotion’ but the ‘strongest effects’ require bodily copresence, the W5K did not warrant ‘ritual failure’. The following section captures how, despite many participants indicating that they missed the ‘sea of pink’, participants found creative ways to craft a virtual event that was experienced as worthwhile and meaningful.

‘Do-it-yourself’ micro-events: Creative labour and using rituals to generate ‘emotional energy’

What was radical about the online W5K was its total reliance on everyday citizens to produce and stage their own micro-events. Participants in the first virtual W5K drew upon a range of creative means to craft their own ‘do-it-yourself’ events outside the stage of a mass participation event. While some participants felt the event lacked the collective emotional resonance of the face-to-face event, at the same time, participants willingly embraced using their creative labour to generate a meaningful experience. As Chloe and Emily captured: ‘I do feel like it was a really enjoyable and quite powerful experience despite not being there with the sea of pink runners’; ‘the crowds aren’t there and the sea of pink you have in Launceston when all the girls and boys take off … so we didn’t have that, but it was still a very affirming and positive action to take, even though it was virtual’.

There were three key interaction rituals participants used to stage their own micro-events and simulate the ‘emotional energy’ of the face-to-face (F2F) event. First, participants appropriated a range of ‘group symbols’ (Collins, 2004) from the F2F event, including pink artefacts such as T-shirts, ribbons, wigs and face paint to create a sense of focused attention and emotion. Wearing and displaying pink symbols was important to transforming an otherwise ordinary run or walk with friends or family into an emotionally salient ritual. Sandra and Grace illustrated this:

We all had pink stuff. We painted pink on our faces. Walked the main road at when we knew there was going to be a lot of traffic … so people would see us dressed in pink.

I had the pink shirt and then we had pink hats and my neighbour who's had cancer came and she had pink on.

Wearing pink was also linked to rituals of remembering and celebrating. Leah, for example, discussed how she ran the event wearing the same pink ribbon she wore at the funeral of her friend's mother who died from breast cancer, while Zoe said ‘we both made sure we had some pink on … as we walked, we talked about [their friend] and her battle and why we were doing it’. This resonates with Moore's (2008) sociological research on ‘ribbon culture’, which identifies the use of ribbons as symbols of mourning and solidarity with a cause or group. Similarly, participants used symbols such as finisher medals to simulate a ‘finish line moment’. This was important for creating emotionally salient social media moments and as a symbolic marker of their achievement and ‘good works’. Due to the flexible timing of the virtual W5K, several participants received their medal before the event, which enabled the ritualistic wearing of the medal in the event itself: ‘We got the medal in the mail prior to the walking, which we thought was great because then we all took turns wearing the medal as we went on our walk’.

Second, most participants undertook their ‘virtual’ 5 km walk/run in pairs or small groups of friends or family. As Zoe explained: ‘I got hold of a couple of friends and said, ‘come on, sign up and do this with me’. Doing the event with others was central to generating a meaningful social ritual. Participants variously described their experience as ‘fun’, ‘enjoyable’, ‘special’ and offering ‘quality time’. Greg explained, for example, how they planned their 5 km run with a friend to finish at a nearby pub where family and friends would be there to ‘cheer them on’ and celebrate with them afterwards. A small group of participants undertook the event alone. For example, Leah discussed how she relied on wearing pink and playing music to generate a sense of emotional atmosphere for her solo event: ‘I decked myself out in pink and all the number and whatever else and yeah, I had a great time by myself. I had music going and yeah … I think I might have even had pink hair at the time’.

Third, participants drew on their own creative rituals to produce emotional resonance in the lead up to, and during, the event. For example, Penelope discussed how their running club made their own T-shirts for their event, complete with individual nicknames, while Elizabeth described how they designed a stamp that featured a picture of herself wearing a Cancer Council T-Shirt to publicise the event. The emphasis on creativity aligns with Cancer Council's own branding strategy for the W5K, which encourages a fun and playful approach to the use of pink attire, clothing and costuming. Their advertising for the event, for example, promotes the use of comic and non-utilitarian clothing styles, such as wearing tutus, feather boas, fairy wings, colourful wigs, face paint or dyed hair. Participants actively shared their creative use of pink imagery and artefacts on social media to signal belonging and shared commitment (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Promotional image used for the virtual event encouraging participants to get their ‘pink on’ and make their own costumes.

Such creativity–and desire for visibility in taking part in the event–chimes with the theoretical framework of extending ritual interactions to value those mediated by technology. In the absence of bodily co-presence, new rituals and micro-interactions are created to produce an emotionally resonant and meaningful event. The following section expands on the role of social media in enabling participants to ‘stage’ their own micro-events.

#doitforher: social media, storytelling, and ‘intimate publics’

The virtual W5K placed the burden on digital media affordances to generate affective connection to the cause (preventing/curing cancer), event (W5K) and organisation (Cancer Council Tasmania). Facebook and Instagram were the main platforms used by participants and the Cancer Council to share images and stories of progress in training and fundraising, and accomplishments in completing the event. Returning to the theoretical scaffolding of micro-sociology and a foregrounding of the social shaping of technology, the virtual W5K enabled a uniquely digital ‘stage’ (Goffman, 1982) for participants to perform and present charitable identities and emotionally connect with their imagined audiences. These digital impressions, articulated through intense experiences and emotions such as illness, suffering, loss, death, remembering and hope, generated ‘intimate publics’ where ‘feelings of belonging’ circulate and create shared worldviews and imaginaries (Berlant, 2008: viii). The digital production and consumption of ‘intimate publics’ occurred both individually and organisationally.

At the individual level, participants’ stories revealed how they used social media to create a sense of moral and emotional engagement before, during and post-event completion. For example, participants such as Greg described how they posted ‘selfies’ and ‘videos’ during their run to help ‘bring people on the journey’ while Penelope discussed how ‘it was nice seeing the photos afterwards … not just photos of yourself, but of your friends’. Some participants discussed how they used intimate imagery of the embodied experience of cancer to craft unique and engaging fundraising appeals. Grace, for instance, detailed sharing online images that portrayed her progressive hair loss from chemotherapy treatment and how she believed that ‘made a difference’ to her fundraising efforts:

Cause I'd been taking photographs of myself with less and less hair and then without hair … people could go on and actually see that. Yeah. I think it made a lot of difference. People seeing me without hair, to be honest, looking back … the power of the image would have made a difference.

Stories such as Grace's provide powerful examples of how visualising the suffering body via social media is now a key feature of ‘embodied philanthropy’ (Robert, 2018). Research shows that perceptions of pain and effort are linked to higher donations (Olivola and Shafir, 2013) and that social media storytelling can be an effective tool for overcoming fundraising challenges (Filo et al., 2019). Here, participants are drawing upon narratives of the ‘wounded’ or ‘suffering’ body to create ‘empathy paths’ (Ruiz-Junco, 2017) that make visible charitable subjectivities deemed morally worthy. Similarly, other participants discussed how they developed strategic approaches to social media engagement to ‘hook people in’ but not ‘piss off’ people by ‘flooding the socials’ (Chloe). Chloe, for example, explained that she would ‘drop in’ weekly and ‘make that post a different post each time’. Focused on posts that communicated ‘what cancer means to her’, Chloe was highly effective in using digital storytelling to engage her audience, reporting she was the second highest fundraiser for the W5K that year. Chloe reflected on how the reliance on social media affordances for virtual event fundraising generated a different, and perhaps even more significant collective ‘emotional energy’ (Collins, 2004): ‘I also don't think that I [previously] had a sense of the fundraising element being such a shared thing … it was a feature that you could tap into other people's experiences more than perhaps in previous years’. Participants such as Grace and Chloe provide striking illustrations of how digital media produce ‘intimate publics’, offering an experience of shared connection and emotional belonging around the personal impacts of cancer (Berlant, 2008: p. viiii).

While ‘intimate publics’ (Berland, 2008) depend on the almost confessional quality of digital media, other participants noted the difficult balance in deciding how ‘public’ to be with their intimate digital disclosures. Maureen, for example, a participant living with cancer, along with two direct family members, said she preferred to avoid sharing their family diagnosis as part of her online fundraising efforts. This ‘privacy calculus’ digitises Goffman's (1982) ‘face-work’, as participants navigated concerns about privacy, humility and authenticity in their online presentations of self. While this could be ‘a huge big story’, and prove highly effective in eliciting donations, Maureen declared, ‘I’m just not really sure we are that type of family’. Other respondents, like Elizabeth, expressed their discomfort with social media, opting for direct solicitation:

I am not a fan of social media. My fundraising was done through emails to people I knew, however remotely. I ended up with a donation from Canada and several from the mainland, because that's what you can do electronically, but it was through email. As I say, I'm not a Facebook fan.

The event website was also key to producing an intimate digital public (Dobson et al., 2018) at an organisational level. The website hosted a tribute wall, participants’ personal fundraising pages, training kilometres logged (with options to link profiles to self-tracking fitness apps like Strava) and social media feed. The social media feed was crucial in unifying digital traces across platforms into a shared space to help generate collective ‘emotional energy’ (Collins, 2004). Here, hashtags such as #doitforher and #womens5k worked as key ‘sociotechnical formations’ (Omena et al., 2020), enabling organisers and participants to link the more individualising qualities of the do-it-yourself virtual event to the collective and institutional mission of Cancer Council. The shared social media feed focused on sharing motivational and celebratory images and stories that helped generate ‘collective effervescence’ (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Example posts from Instagram and Facebook reshared to Women's 5 km social media feed on the event website.

The final section turns to examine how the DIY quality of the virtual event generated a range of unintended practical and inclusive benefits for W5K participants.

Customising your own event: practicality, accessibility and inclusivity

A key tension in participants’ accounts was missing the ‘emotional energy’ (Collins, 2004) of the F2F event while acknowledging the practical and accessibility benefits the virtual event afforded. Participants discussed how the virtual event brought a degree of autonomy and convenience that the mass event did not offer. For example, many participants expressed how they enjoyed being able to schedule and design their event experience on their own terms. As Chloe said: ‘And that's why I liked the virtual nature of this, you didn't need others to make it happen. You know, you could do it yourself and you weren't waiting on a particular time or occasion or whatever’. Participants expressed how being able to choose when and where participants completed the event (within a 2-week window) made the event more accessible to individuals with diverse schedules and fitness levels. In Grace's words:

I just found it was practical and flexible and doable and, and we could have a contingency plan if we wanted as well … So yeah, like it, it suited us that way. And you could choose where you wanted to walk because I mean, some people could just walk around their garden or around their farm.

This do-it-yourself quality of the virtual W5K meant it was experienced as more inclusive and equitable. Elizabeth, for example, shared how she hoped Cancer Council would ‘do it virtually again’ as she enjoyed the flexibility but also how it could be used to be more inclusive of groups such as older people or those living with disabilities (e.g. complete the virtual event over a series of shorter runs/walks). Similarly, participants such as Abigail – a self-described ‘busy Mum’ with a young toddler – highlighted how the flexibility of the virtual format was more accommodating for people like her with caring responsibilities: ‘As a mum with an almost toddler just, yeah, you can do it [virtual events] whenever and that's, what's really drawn me into doing the virtual runs as well. It's the flexibility and the ability to do it whenever’. Abigail's experience resonates with wider evidence showing that caring responsibilities are a key barrier to women's participation in sport and leisure (Hartmann-Tews, 2015), and points to the use of virtual modalities as a potential strategy to increase women's engagement in sports charity events.

The virtual event was also framed for several participants as increasing participants' psychological and bodily comfort. This was related to COVID-19-related concerns, but more commonly feelings that mass participation sports events induce unwelcome pressures around ‘competition’, ‘keeping up’ and ‘public appearance’. Interviewees noted that there was less ‘pressure’ and ‘stress’ taking part in small and intimate self-selected groups, without normative pressures around competition and physical ability. Chloe and Maureen exemplified these themes:

When you're running in these big events, it's kind of exciting, but it's also a bit hectic, you know? And that sense of competition–which I'm not particularly good at–comes to the fore and being overtaken by people or overtaking people sometimes is odd and awkward for some people … So to not have those distractions, this time actually really enhanced the event for me. (Chloe)

I think I enjoyed the virtual event more because I was with my family. Yeah, I think I felt more pressured probably … [in prior, in-person events with work colleagues] to walk faster or try and keep up more … Yeah, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the [virtual] family one. (Maureen)

Similarly, interviewees raised how the virtual event offset women's concerns about bodily aesthetics and not being ‘serious runners’ (Energici et al., 2021). Virtual events were experienced as beneficial, as participants did not need to ‘show their body’ or have their ‘level of fitness’ on public display. As Jill said, ‘being self-conscious about my body, I felt the virtual run would suit me better. At my own pace without all my wobbly bits on public display’. Others, such as Chloe, suggested the virtual W5K addressed concerns about not wanting to run in ‘sea of people who might be able to actually run particularly well’. These findings highlight women's potential reticence to exercise – and compete – in public spaces, which aligns with research observing that burdensome aesthetic norms of femininity remain key barriers to women's involvement in physical culture (Energici et al., 2021). In this way, the virtual W5K ameliorated concerns about FP events being the preserve of privileged ‘serious leisure’ athletes (Elkington and Stebbins, 2014), opening events to different bodies, capacities and skills: ‘I think [the virtual event] is just fantastic … yeah, I haven’t seen those kinds of people participate in the event when it wasn’t virtual’ [Chloe]. Further research is needed to determine the benefits of virtual sports charity events for women and whether these benefits extend to men and the dynamics involved.

Conclusion

This research makes an original contribution to sociological understandings of ‘lockdown leisure’ (Lee Ludvigsen et al., 2023), showing how smaller and community-based sports events adapted to the challenges of the pandemic, an area that has received less sociological attention compared to mega-events (Lee Ludvigsen, 2022). Drawing upon interviews with participants in Cancer Council Tasmania's virtual Women's 5 km event, the research highlights the creative ways people make, perform and give meaning to their own ‘do-it-yourself’ mass-participation sports charity event. Locating fitness philanthropy within cultural shifts towards ‘embodied philanthropy’ and individualised ‘charitable bodies’ (Nettleton and Hardey, 2006), the paper theorises digital FP events using Collins’ theory of interaction rituals. The paper argues that while Collins’ (2002) theory is important for underlining the importance of interaction rituals to generate ‘emotional energy’ and social connection, the requirement for ‘bodily co-presence’ overlooks how technologically-mediated rituals can still produce emotionally and socially resonant sports charity experiences. Utilising insights from social shaping of technology (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999) and ‘digital intimacies’ (Berlant, 2008; Dobson et al., 2018) perspectives, the paper extends Collins’ work to show how W5K participants – despite missing the ‘sea of pink’ – creatively staged their own ‘micro’ events that were distinct, emotionally powerful and provided practical and inclusive benefits.

This research also helps drive theory forward in the sociology of sport by applying Collins’ theory to a new empirical context. A key finding was that many participants expressed missing the ‘sea of pink’ and the collective emotional ‘buzz’, ‘atmosphere’ and ‘energy’ of the F2F event. While this finding echoes Collins’ (2004: 60) arguments that the ‘strongest effects’ of interaction rituals require ‘full bodily assembly’, the virtual W5K event was far from a ‘ritual failure’ (Collins, 2004). Participants’ stories highlight how the event produced a different rather than diminished form of ‘emotional energy’, along with the creative labours they employed to craft their own virtual event and produce a meaningful experience. Three key interaction rituals were identified as important to participants ‘staging’ their own micro-events: (1) use of pink ‘group symbols’ such as clothing, ribbons, wigs and face-paint; (2) undertaking their events ‘socially’ in pairs or with small groups of family and friends; and (3) creating their own artefacts such as customised T-shirts, stamps and use of non-utilitarian and playful costuming. This study refines and extends Collins’ (2004) interaction ritual theory by demonstrating that digital sports events can be powerful generators of emotional energy without bodily co-presence, particularly through interaction rituals that blur simple online/offline binaries and fuse technology, emotion and social interaction.

Digital practices were key to producing (and consuming) the W5K event, with nearly all participants using Facebook or Instagram to craft their fundraising appeal, share their journey and make visible morally worthy charitable subjectivities. From images of the ‘wounded’ cancer body to highly curated storytelling approaches, digital media affordances were crucial to developing ‘empathy paths’ (Ruiz-Junco, 2017) that helped forge affective and moral connections with the cause, event and organisation. The (re)circulation of digital traces operated individually and organisationally to produce ‘intimate publics’ (Berlant, 2008) where diverse narratives, experiences and bodies are given public expression and meaning. Digital disclosures were shown to pivot on a ‘privacy calculus’ (Gonzales et al., 2016), where participants reflexively questioned how ‘public’ to be with their cancer experiences, with some participants restraining disclosures while others completely shirked social media, opting instead for direct solicitations to known donors. Further, hashtags such as #doitforher served as key ‘sociotechnical’ structures (Omena et al., 2020) that established shared ‘emotional energy’ and linked the individualised DIY event experiences to institutional and collective aspirations, goals and hopes.

Finally, participants’ stories pinpointed how the virtual W5K produced distinctive practical and inclusive benefits. A standout of the virtual event for most participants was that ‘you could do it yourself’ with the flexibility to stage your own ‘micro’ events without the restrictions of time or place. This resonates with research suggesting that the increased flexibility offered by virtual formats may ensure their continued presence alongside in-person events (Bunds et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2024; Svensson and Radmann, 2023; Westmattelmann et al., 2021). Unique to this research is showing how those inclusivity benefits can benefit social groups such as women with caring responsibilities or older people living with disabilities. The findings showed how the virtual event established a less threatening and more welcoming space, especially for women who may not be comfortable with norms of competition, having to ‘show their body’ in pubic and who may not identify as ‘serious’ runners. With established concerns that fitness philanthropy events reproduce existing class and gendered inequalities, these findings signal potential benefits of sports charity events continuing to use virtual or online options. While virtual FP events emerged as a response to pandemic restrictions, they have since become a staple ‘add-on’ to established sports charity events (e.g. London Marathon, Tour de Cure), providing ways to walk, run or cycle for charity ‘your own way’. Further research is needed to establish the broader theoretical and practical implications of virtual FP events and how they expand or contract ‘empathy paths’, how they challenge or reproduce structural inequalities, and more generally what virtual shared experiences mean for collective emotion and community making and their ongoing relevance to studies of philanthropy, micro-sociology and digital social life.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Nicholas Hookway

Catherine Palmer

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