The Justgiving charities blog

Map My London

As I was taking the Tube home last night, reading my lovely free copy of thelondonpaper, I had a look at their "Website of the Day" which was www.mapmylondon.com

This brilliant website is an initiative from the Museum of London that aims to map Londoners' life experiences onto a Google map of the city.

Registering on the site is free and you can pinpoint the exact spot where you had your Love or Loss, or Joy or Struggle, or any other emotional moment(s) in this great city:

You can also search by street name, postcode or year to find your special place - or just to find others' (I've added a note about my student house in Bonny Street if you're interested), and there are already plenty of tales up there, from the amusing to the heart-wrenching.

This isn't the first Charity mash-up site, (the NSPCC had one for their Be the Full Stop campaign) but it's brilliantly imaginative and I love it.

If you yourself feel inspired, go to www.mapmylondon.com and get involved, or you can make a donation to the Museum of London at www.justgiving.com/museumoflondon/donate

The Flyers are flying

Just over a month ago, we brought you news about the New fundraising flyers we'd created for you to put in your fundraising packs. As they were free, all you needed to do was email us with the number required and your address and we'd sort the rest!

The response has been pretty spectacular, as we've now sent 12,915 flyers to 56 different charities.

But don't worry if you haven't ordered any, there are still some left if you need them: just email me the details and I'll pop over to our local post office to send them (I'm almost on first name terms with all the nice people who work there now...)

And today I'll leave the last word to Carole Gryglaszewska, Head of Fundraising at HEART UK, who seemed to like them:

They’ve arrived and I have to congratulate whoever designed these – they’re so simple but say it all

Czech-mate!

Whilst I was at the London Marathon Expo yesterday, I met loads of great fundraisers and said 'hi' to a lot of charities, but one of the most interesting people who came over to our stand (316) was Jakub Zeman.

Jakub is running for Tusk Trust and his page is at http://www.justgiving.com/bino

The great thing about his page is that he's translated the usual Justgiving blurb into Czech for all his friends and family.

Apparently, "Donating through this site is simple, fast and totally secure" translates as "Sponzorství přes tuto stránku je jednoduché, rychlé a úplně bezpečné" in Czech. But then, you all knew that anyway.

And Jakub is not the only polyglot on Justgiving... According to Marcus Pfaff the same phrase is "Das Spenden durch diese Web Seite ist einfach, schnell und absolut sicher" auf Deutsch. En espanol, it is "Donar por esta via es simple, rápido y seguro" thanks to Roberto Messuti

You can also visit Adriana Eggleton's page to learn how to fundraise in Spanish: Solo haz click donde dice "Sponsor us now" (which I understand thanks to the wonderful Teresa Garcia at King's College MLC)

Remember, Justgiving fundraising pages can be used by people all over the world to raise funds for UK charities (as per our help section here).

So, watch out for a Juste Donnent, Apenas Dando or Gerade Gebend ("just giving" in French, Spanish in German thanks to babelfish) coming soon to a fundraising page near you!

 

(Sweat) Band-Aid

The Flora London Marathon Expo starts today, and most of JG Towers (including some of the techies and finance people) will be going down at some point over the next four days to give advice and answer any questions.

It's a great opportunity for us to meet with some of the most passionate users of our website and to get some face-to-face feedback from them.

To do that, we've taken over a few laptops so people can check their fundraising pages, and we'll be surveying as many FLM fundraisers as we can to try and find out how we can improve the website and help them raise more funds.

As there are currently 14,329 Flora London Marathon fundraising pages on Justgiving, collecting donations for a staggering 1,131 different charities, we won't be able to talk to them all, but we can try!

Plus, anyone who takes our survey will get a free Justgiving Sweatband as shown below (Boots Cod Liver Oil not included)

The data we get back from our surveys will then be used by our Product Team to help them decide what new features we should develop. All this is part of our goal to help your fundraisers raise more money for you.

So, if you or your fundraisers are at the Expo and fancy a chat, we'll be on stand 316 (look out for the fancy T-Shirts).

But don't worry if you can't come, Simon will be live blogging every day with stories from fundraisers, so keep an eye on our fundraiser blog for all the news.

Webi-what? Webin-ah!

Whilst we gear up for the busiest week of the year before the Flora London Marathon next Sunday, a small piece of history was made by Tony from the Royal School for the Deaf Derby and Andrew from the Guards Museum Trust.

What history was that, I hear you ask... Well, Tony and Andrew were this morning the first ever attendees of a Justgiving Webinar. And what, do you ask, is a Webinar when it's at home?

As good as any explanation is "A Webinar is a Web-based seminar, a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the Internet." and you can find out more at the trusty Wikipedia entry.

A Justgiving Webinar involves us (well, for the time being, me) using some fancy software to share my desktop screen with a number of people and then talk them through my actions (using a conference call). The point of this is that we can demonstrate a number of features of the Justgiving site to a large (or this time, small) audience.

For our first run of webinars, the agenda is quite straightforward and is the target audience is charities that are new to Justgiving.

In it, we go through the process of creating a fundraising page and making a donation; we take a look at two examples (Childnet and the Samaritans) of  best practice charity linking and finish with an introduction to the Charity Account, as you can see below:

If you're new to the site and interested in attending, please email me as although we've started off doing one a week,  we'll  be increasing the frequency until we hold as many as Maggie (here looking very flash with US Beth and UK Ben) does with our American cousins...

Help is at Hand

I brought you some news in February about the last improvement our techies made to the Charity Account, and I'm really excited by our latest update: for today marks the launch of a new Help Section for your account.

Now when you log-in to the Charity Account, you will see a new Account help button on the top right, as shown below:

When you click on the Account help button, you will see a a new window including the 13 most frequently asked questions, which you can then click on to find the answers (and with any luck, these 13 FAQs won't be cursed by being announced on Friday 13th...).

You can take a look now by clicking here

This list has been created by those of us who man (or woman) the helpdesk or speak to you, the charities who use Justgiving, every day: we compiled a list of all Charity Account queries we received, so this section is based on your feedback and questions, and the answers we gave.

We will be adding some tutorials to this section in the coming weeks (similar to those in the main help section here) to assist further, and you can, of course, still contact us if your question is not answered.

Having said that, we're confident that this is a first step that will, like Ronseal, do what it says on the tin and help you out!

Donors can now leave you a message!

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new feature enabling donors to leave a message for their charity with their donation.

This is the most requested update from your donors and will be especially useful for those making donations on behalf of a loved one.

Our Product Manager, Will Hardy, explains:

What is it?

When a user makes a donation on the Justgiving site or via a dedicated donation facility (like here) they will be given the option of leaving a message for their charity as per the screen-grab below:

A donor is only able to leave a message if they reveal their details to the charity, so when a user starts typing in their message, the "Please tick here if you want The Demo Charity...." box (highlighted in red above) will be automatically ticked.

We have also updated the text in this option and included a tooltip to make it clearer to users what details are passed on to you. When you hover the mouse pointer over the sentence, the box below appears:

This will undoubtedly have an effect on your charity’s opt-in rates: if a donor leaves you a message, their details will appear in your online Charity Account.

Where can I find the message?

The donor’s message will only be available in the Payment and Direct Donation reports created in the Charity Account:

You will be able to see your donors’ messages by selecting the "Message from Donor" option when you decide on the columns to feature in your reports, as below in a Payment Report:

This "Message from Donor" column will not be visible if you are using saved custom column selections. You will have to select "JG Default View" to see this column and you can then set-up your customised columns again to include it if you wish.

This column will then be exported in the relevant section of your report and you will be able to see the donors’ contact details.

Please note this does not apply to donations made via fundraising pages, where sponsors can already leave a message on the page.

What should I do with it?

This functionality is most likely to be used by people making In Memory donations, so we would suggest you check your account frequently to find out what messages have been left. As you will see the contact details for all the donors, you are then able to contact them and thank them appropriately.

If you do receive a lot of ‘In Mem’ donations, we recommend you promote the new “donate” link on your own website.

If you have any questions, please contact me.

New links for you on Justgiving

We have updated the links to your charity on Justgiving to make them a more accurate reflection of the content on each page, and we've also created a new page for you.

You now have three links on Justgiving:

1. http://www.justgiving.com/jgdemo/supportus

This page is similar to the old donate page, as it gives your supporters the choice to donate or raise money.

    2.   http://www.justgiving.com/jgdemo/donate

This page stands alone to accept one-off or monthly online donations.

    3.  http://www.justgiving.com/jgdemo/raisemoney

This page is where your supporters can create an online fundraising page for an event or occasion of their choice.

This page now has a list of top 5 fundraisers and will soon be showing a list of the top 5 most popular pages below (i.e. pages with the most donations for your charity over the preceding week). To accommodate this, your charity search box has moved to the right.

OK, so how should I now link to Justgiving?

The “support us” page links through to both the “donate” and “raise money” pages, and it is what your supporters will find when they search for your charity on Justgiving. They can then choose whether to donate or fundraise for you.

What we recommend you do on your own website (or in any communication with your supporters), is link directly to your online donations page or your fundraising area.

A great example of how to do this can be seen at http://www.childnet-int.org/support

The Childnet page is a shining example of best practice for three reasons: it explains what Justgiving is, how their supporters can use it to raise money or donate and where they need to go to do so.

With these new links, you can now promote the relevant area of Justgiving to your donors or fundraisers in all your online and offline communications.

JG Clinic open to patients

In order to help further the fundraisers on Justgiving, we recently started a new series of posts on our blog called the JG Clinic.

Our User Marketing Manager, Simon Doggett, explains the thinking behind it:

The JG Clinic was born through charity supporters. Lots of them have made brilliant fundraising pages in the past and it's important to share best practice with the community.

The quality of a personal message and photo along with savvy email marketing can greatly increase an individual's donations.

It's our duty to share the knowledge we have with others trying to raise funds, so we created an environment for users to learn and join in.

You can see all the posts made so far by clicking here. We would encourage you to send this link to your supporters and/or promote it on your website.

We share our own hints & tips in the forum, but as Simon says, following others fundraisers’ tried and tested examples can really lead to receiving more donations.

And we all know that we should do what Simon says...

How badges promote pages

Simon announced back in February the release of Justgiving Badges that can be used to promote a fundraising page.

These are small images that a user can post on any website to link to their fundraising page and they've since proved really popular.

This is what they look like...

...and you can see them in action on Noel’s blog or on the MySpace pages for Gaz, Jayne and Chris.

Simon's also posted a video to show how you can add one to your email signature.

Badges are very easy to use, and the steps are the same as for getting a “widget”. If you go to any fundraising page and click on “promote this page” under the thermometer, you should then click on “Grab a fundraising widget” and you can either use a widget, or copy and paste the html for the badges.

We have offered badges to fundraisers as the code our widgets use (iframes) is not supported on some social networking sites like bebo and Facebook. We are currently developing a new version of widgets that will work on these sites.

There's a Forum for 'em

We try to provide as much help and support to your fundraisers as we can at Justgiving, ranging from the good old helpdesk manned by real people (on 0845 021 2110 or help@justgiving.net) to the JG Clinic on our blog.

Try as we might though, there are some questions we just can't answer (although not always as bizarre as “What time is Sandra climbing the mountain?”)  that only a fellow fundraiser can: what are the best shoes to  wear for my run, how did you find the last thousand metres of Everest, what's the quickest route from Land's End to John o'Groats?...

This is where the marvellous Justgiving Community comes in:

The Community is a place filled with forums where fundraisers chat about their efforts, share hints and tips and ask questions of the people who really know what they're going through.

If your supporters don't know about it, have a look at these three great threads to see why they should:

"Jb5" asked about a Cycle India event, and the thread has had a massive 186 replies.

Jen is doing a trek to Machu Piccu and wanted to meet other people doing the same thing.

Alasdair is climbing Kilimanjaro in June and wanted some advice from the forum - he found other people taking the challenge for different charities at different times willing to help out.

The above threads show how the forum can not only be a useful resource but can also foster a sense of community amongst the amazing fundraisers on the Justgiving website.

So whilst we all chase the web 2.0 dream on the so-called "social-web", let's not forget the power of the humble forum.