The Justgiving charities blog

New Columns on Payment reports! Wow!

Now, I've announced some exciting new features in my time, but this is possibly the best - yes, we have added two new columns for you to select when downloading payment reports. And what snappy column titles they are:

So there you have it, Estimated VAT and Net Donation Minus Estimated VAT. A real cool addition to the column selections.

But seriously, this is an important update, one that many of you asked for. Why? Well, it's all to do with the way we transfer money to you.

As you know, we charge a 5% transaction fee on every donation and VAT is applicable on that amount. But we only calculate the VAT for the total fees for each payment we make to you, not on each individual donation.

In the Finance Reports section of the Charity Account, you can see a high level breakdown of the Gross and Net payments as below (with amounts erased, obviously):

You can download a PDF giving you a one page invoice detailing the total amounts and deductions when you click on view details but you can now see that breakdown in the detailed reports for each payment too.

So if you need to attribute VAT on each donation, or record net donation without VAT (depending on your financial systems), you can easily do so once a payment report has been created.

But remember, these figures are only estimated per donation since the actual VAT is calculated on the total fees taken - dividing the total VAT to all the donations will inevitably cause some small rounding errors.

So there you are, that was me trying to make VAT exciting. Now I know how Adam Hart-Davis feels...

Introducing the Justgiving Welcome Pack

Drum roll please... Yes, it's time for us to announce our first ever Justgiving Welcome Pack! This pack is designed to give you all the info you will ever need to know about our service in a lovely shiny folder, with nice colours and everything.

It's the culmination of much work from the finest minds at JG Towers and it has been developed over a longer time period that we'd like to admit. So whilst it was originally designed to help new charities, we're sending it to every other charity too, because we're nice like that.

Here's a sneak peak at the outside:

 

And within? Well, there's a letter from our CEO, Zarine, and MD, Anne-Marie. But also, there are four information sheets covering the below subjects:

• Raise more money

Hints and tips on how to optimise your online fundraising through Justgiving, plus examples of how
other charities have successfully used our service.

• Your online charity account

A summary of the various financial reports and resources you’ll find in your secure online account.

• What happens to your money?

Information on how Justgiving’s financial systems operate. This includes details of how and when we
make donation payments, how we process Gift Aid and how transaction, card and VAT charges affect
donations made through Justgiving.

• We’re here to help

Useful Justgiving contacts to help you and your supporters raise more.

Now we'll be adding to the pack over time, and we'll give you PDFs to download and print off. But for the time being, I won't show you what each sheet includes as it would ruin the surprise!

So, watch out for the pack in the post in the next week or so, and be sure to let me know what you think.

Free Rice! My charity site of the month

A big thanks to the effervescent Mike on our helpdesk for the link to this great site:
www.freerice.com

In its own words, the goal of the site is twofold:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. It's the sister site of www.poverty.com and is basically a word game: you're given a word and have to choose the right meaning, and for every word you get right, they donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Programme to help fight hunger.

How? Well, companies pay to advertise on the site and that money goes to help fight hunger. Clever, huh!

And from a measly 830 grains donated on the first day (the 7th October) it has *raised* a total of 195,074,730 grains as of yesterday.

I must admit to being mildly addicted: it gives me the chance to be, er, simultaneously voraciously verbose and phenomenally philanthropic...

But what makes it so addictive is that the difficulty of the words is automatically adjusted based on your answers, so you're continually playing at your own level: I got up to vocab level 42, what's yours? (Mike got to level 48, so that's put me in my place!)

Have a look at their FAQ for more info.

Now this is a Facebook profile

It's safe to say I was a little excited when Becs emailed me this gem of a pic:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Leonard Cheshire Disability's awesome profile page - check out the fundraising pages they're promoting using the Justgiving application!

Big thanks to Rebecca at the charity for letting us showcase this, they've clearly been busy adding  fundraising pages left, right and centre!

And if you want to encourage people to do this too, I'd take a leaf out of Thames 21's Facebook group and read the "recent news" section where they promote the JG application to their supporters on Facebook:

Gold stars all round :-)

Flora London Marathon bits and bobs

Last night I went along to a evening for charities with silver and gold bond places in the Flora London Marathon to take part in a small Q&A session for the silver bond charities.

I'm not going to go into whether the bond system is fair or not (there are plenty of other places you can talk (or listen) about that) so I'll just give a quick rundown of some tools people can use to make the best of their place.

Now the best place to start is (why of course!) the official Flora London Marathon fundraising site at www.justgiving.com/londonmarathon

As you can see, there are plenty of pages already built (124 actually) way before the event takes place, and Craig Purdie has already raised an impressive £1,525 (plus £306.03 in Gift Aid)! Talk about fundraising early and getting the money in before the event - there's only 5 months and 23 days left till the run...

Once you've got your fundraiser to create a page, I'd recommend you push them towards our Official London Marathon Top Ten Fundraising Tips, a great post by our user guru Simon. It includes some great advice and shares secrets that some of the top Marathon fundraisers have used on the Justgiving site to raise as much money as they can.

But in addition to Simon's tips, some of the newer features on Justgiving can be employed to spread the word in true Web 2.0 style (oh how I loathe that hackneyed phrase).

For example, your fundraisers could create their own blog on Realbuzz, and use that to keep people up-to-date about their training, not to mention using a Justgiving widget to keep tabs on their fundraising.

And next year, I'd imagine we'll be seeing an explosion of people promoting their marathon pages on Facebook using the already popular Justgiving application - this is sure to be a theme I'll come back to in the coming months.

So, thanks to those who came and said "hi" to me last night, it's always nice to meet people face to face. And also a big thanks to my fellow panellists, the lovely Edward Copisarow, Chief Executive of CHILDREN with LEUKAEMIA and the famous Dave Bedford.

(he's not famous for being named after my home town)

Not another Facebook post

Er, well, actually it is. But, before you click away, I won't be long so stay with me.

I've already said enough about our Facebook application for now, plus there's a great post over on Hitwise (not to mention an intro to the site in Third Sector) that deals more with that side of things.

I just wanted to find out what exactly charities are using the site for, whether it helped and how. To that end, I asked Ian Beningfield, Fundraising Manager at the Meningitis Research Foundation about their group on the site:

When did your charity start using Facebook and why?

The Foundation started using Facebook over the summer. We work extremely closely with the student community as they represent one of the groups most at risk from meningitis & septicaemia, we are also very lucky to receive a great deal of financial support from students fundraising on our behalf.

The growth of Facebook over the last year meant that it was a great way to get in contact with our university supporters and keep them up to date with what events we've got on.

As time went on I noticed more and more users signing up to the group. Many of the new sign ups weren't students so we've updated the group so that it focuses on all of our events not just those aimed at students.

What do you use it for?

We use Facebook as a way of plugging any up and coming events. It's proved to be a great viral way of getting the message out to the wider community with very little effort and no cost.

We also use the page to direct visitors through to our own website through links posted on the site, either to get them to sign up for new events or just to let them know about our work.

Has it helped? And if so, how?

It's made it really easy to contact a lot of people really quickly and because of the way in which Facebook works, if one person signs up to an event then all their friends will see that, meaning word quickly spreads.

So, there we go. A big thanks to Ian for sharing his thoughts, because if I was trying to sell the benefits of Facebook to a charity, I don't think I could say it any better than he did:

It's proved to be a great viral way of getting the message out to the wider community with very little effort and no cost.

Extension to fundraising page expiry date

From next Tuesday (16th October) we are extending the expiry date for sporting types of fundraising pages from two months to three months.

Come again?

Well, at present all pages created for a sporting event are set to expire two months after the event date. What happens when a page expires is that whilst it can still be viewed online, it can no longer accept donations, and the page owner no longer appears in the 'Sponsor a friend' search.

Why have we done this?

Lots of page owners ask us every day to extend the life of their page so they can accept more donations (it's one of our top 5 queries on the helpdesk). Rich, our lead developer, has also done some tecchy analysis on when donations are made to pages in relation to the event date.

The graph below shows the number of donations made to all sporting pages in relation to the event date (or "Logarithmic user-created sporting event sponsorship in relation to respective event date" in tech speak):

As you can see, there is a big drop in donations at the 2 month period, with a smattering of donations after that point (where page owners have asked us to extend the life of their page).

In a nutshell then, we've made this change to help users who fundraise for longer, which will therefore mean more donations going to you, the charities.

How will this affect you?

Clearly, the first thing you'll need to bear in mind is that all your event participants will have an extra month to collect donations - so you will only be able to get a final total for each event three months after it has taken place.

For example, all pages for next year's London Marathon, which takes place on the 13th April, will expire on the 13th August 2008.

Yes, this may mean a longer wait for you to figure out how much money an event has raised (although it will still be quicker than money raised offline), but it does also mean you'll get more donations. And we thought you'd like that :-)

PS - on a less exciting note, for 'occasion' type pages (i.e. birthdays, weddings, In Mem pages) we will be removing the 3-month expiry option, defaulting the drop-down to 18 months and adding 24 months as an option for page length.

Outstanding Supporter Care – Breakfast Talk

Last week, we held another idea-sharing Breakfast Talk about Outstanding Supporter Care.

Lots of best practice examples from different charities were shared, highlighting the fact that the more your supporters enjoy their fundraising experience with your charity, the more they’ll want to raise and the more people they will tell about their experience!

Help your fundraisers:

The highlights from the discussion included VSO and the resources they make available on their website: an online fundraising pack and a fundraising ideas A-Z, amongst many others.

The offline resource created by Help the Hospices, entitled 'Making the best of Justgiving', is another great resource. It gets posted to all their fundraisers and Geoff Watson of the charity explained,

We hope our one-pager gives our supporters enough handy hints to ensure their Justgiving page works well for them. We've raised almost 50% more through Justgiving this year so far, so maybe the one-pager is working!

Download making_the_best_of_justgiving.pdf

Contact your fundraisers:

Médecins Sans Frontières’ robust contact strategy ensures no supporters fall through the cracks. Sam Knight from MSF contacts supporters as soon as their page is built, before the event itself and then after to say thank you.

Thank your fundraisers:

Thanking supporters for their efforts is essential, as one supporter said,

It gives me a lovely feeling knowing that I am doing this for the good of others. And it just confirms why I am doing it when I receive emails of thanks from the charity for the money I have raised.

Such a complete approach results in supporters coming back time and time again to raise funds for the charity.

A supporter care strategy works well for many charities. Here’s an example (click to enlarge):

Promote your fundraisers:

Featuring your supporters, both on your website and in your offline communications, is also a great motivator for them and others. The Samaritans do this very well as do the Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre (MSRC).

Abi Crawford from MSRC said,

We couldn't be more enthusiastic about Justgiving, and that's contagious when it comes to our fundraisers. Over the last 12 months we have seen real growth in our fundraising and Justgiving has played a very big part in that growth - for a smaller charity like MSRC that has made a very real difference!

Tell your fundraisers how they help your charity:

Lots of charities such as Comic Relief, GOSH and Asthma UK explain to supporters how their donations will be invested. This is crucial if you want them to fully engage with your charity and reassure them that their money is being put to excellent use.

Details of the full talk will soon be available in the Marketing Resources area of your charity account to download.

Many thanks to all charities who contributed to this session – they’ve shared some great examples of how to make the perfect supporter experience.

Adoption like you've never seen it before

Now I don't normally talk about specific donation pages we've built for people (Kai blushes and goes all shy when I do), but his most recent work is, I think, worthy of a much wider audience.

Yes, our latest customised Online Donation Service, for The Male Cancer Awareness Campaign, is one where you can Adopt a Bollock!

No, I'm not going nuts, and this isn't a load of, er, balls, but an appeal to raise awareness of male cancer. In their own words:

We aim to stop men dying of ignorance by increasing awareness about prostate, testicular and bowel cancer. We do it in a fun way, to help break down the culture of embarrassment that prevents men from addressing problems with their nether parts.

They have already promoted the Mr Testicles challenge, where an intrepid testicle trekked from Land's End to John O'Groats and who's now taking on the Chicago Marathon.

If you're intereseted, you can follow his progress on their rather amusing blog - to say it is somewhat tongue in cheek is an understatement...

Plus, to find out more about the charity, visit their website at www.mrtesticles.com or read more on how to adopt from the Top Bollocks Adoption Agency...