The Justgiving charities blog

Welcome Pack Feedback

It's been over a month since the launch of our Welcome Pack and your feedback has been great - 95% of people surveyed (153) have said that the pack gave them a better understanding of the Justgiving service!

And that was the basic aim of the pack - to educate both new and current charities how the site works in a clearly presented manner.

The most popular section (in terms of usefulness) was the "what happens to your money" part, which averaged a 7.7 score out of 10. Here are all the scores:

So as you can see, it all appears to be pretty useful. But don't just take my word for it, download PDF versions by clicking on the links below:

Download raise_more_money_1.pdf

Download raise_more_money_2.pdf

Download were_here_to_help_1.pdf

Download were_here_to_help_2.pdf

Due to the way it was formatted for printing, the last two sections are together in two files:

Download charity_account_and_your_money_1.pdf

Download charity_account_and_your_money_2.pdf

As for the open ended feedback (what was best/worst about the pack), we had some interesting answers:

The most popular *worst* thing was some people were worried about recycled paper and the environment (fyi we do recycle in the office)…

Unnecessary use of paper as this notification could probably have been posted to us electronically and still conveyed the necessary message

But then for some people, that was the *best* thing:

Receiving it in hard copy information.  Means I and the team will read it.  So easy to have sent it to us electronically and for us not to have given it the time and energy it requires.

Another common theme of the *best* bits was that people liked seeing who we are:

Good to see the team members. What a good looking bunch you all are. :-)

The pics and descriptions about the team is fantastic customer service - especially compared to the high staff turnover, nameless service we've had from other organisations purporting to help charities.

But some of the most interesting things you said were found in the "any other comments" question I asked. Here's a random selection:

Well done for realising that it's not only new members that need this type of information all in one pack.

Justgiving is great and we love it.

Why did you send this to me?? The membership was cancelled in Sept with just a charge for Oct to be paid. Please check your records. (oops!)

And also, thanks for all your suggestions and ideas. They've all been noted and we'll be looking at them in the future (2008 is going to be exciting):

Keep it simple - you mostly do, and it's the best thing about just giving - if it's easy for fundraisers (especially amateur ones) to use, they will.

It would be good for a charity to have it's own fundraising pages rather than just supporters. Some appeals take years and the expiration dates aren't realistic

And if you're really trying to kill time at work interested, check out all the good and bad feedback (without names) at Download welcome_pack_feedback.xls

New widget now works on MySpace

Our funky new widget has been making waves all round the internet since July, everywhere that is, except MySpace. That is, until today. Yes, the fundraising widget now works on the *original* social network, the site that is currently the 6th most popular in the world (that's MySpace, by the way).

In case you'd forgotten what the widget looks like, here's one in action:

To get one yourself is easy - go to any fundraising page, click Promote this page and then Grab a fundraising widget and you'll see the screen below:

If your eyes follow the big red arrow, you'll see a new tab on that page cunningly titled 'MySpace'. In that tab there is some new html code to use if you want a widget to work on MySpace. It's as simple as that!

And while you're doing that, why not take a look at MySpace's new charities channel, Impact, at www.myspace.com/impactuk

Silver Surfers raise 38% more online

Today's post is a fantastic case study about how the so-called silver surfers can use the power of the internet to raise money,  put together by the glamorous Becs:

Christian Aid’s ‘silver surfer’ open day

The problem

Christian Aid performed a detailed analysis of their 2006 events and found that the event ‘In the footsteps of Moses’, a trek through the Egyptian Sinai desert, had not generated any income online.

The reason for this became clear when it was discovered that the age range of the participants for this event was between fifty and seventy.  Alison Gregory from Christian Aid said:

This core audience wasn’t completely familiar with the internet and we wanted to let them know all that the internet has to offer in terms of online sponsorship.

The solution

Rather than write these fundraisers off as internet fundraising ‘lost causes’, Christian Aid decided that it needed to provide them with more help than usual, and chose to invite all fourteen of their next Sinai Desert trekkers to an interactive open day at the charity’s central office.

Alison explains:

It was really easy to set up. We just included an online sponsorship session in our information morning for participants, which we do anyway as part of our communications strategy. At this session we talk about the work Christian Aid does and we all get to meet each other and then we discuss the logistics of the trip with them.

Ten out of the fourteen people we invited came – at the end we did a thirty minute session with them where we gave them lots of fundraising tips, talked about online sponsorship and demonstrated how easy it is to set up a Justgiving fundraising page.

The result

Alison reports that this particular trek raised £60,000 of which £23,000 (even excluding Gift Aid) came in online, which wouldn’t have been raised otherwise:

It was great for us because it meant that people were emailing their pages to relatives and friends all over the world, and not only getting more sponsorship but raising our profile by writing about Christian Aid in their emails

Thanks very much to Alison and Christian Aid for sharing their story, not to mention all you keen silver surfer fundraisers out there!!!

And for an extra special example, here's our very talented designer Kai showing his Gran how to make a donation online:

Showing gran how to use Justgiving.com from Kai Chan Vong on Vimeo.

Global Fundraising

Every week, Dom (our dashing CTO) sends round an email with our site stats for the previous week. It gives us super exciting things like the top 10 domain referrers (#1 is almost always Google), most popular pages and lots of clever tecchy things like the number of page impressions on the site and the average duration of the visit.

But one stat that never ceases to amaze me is the breakdown of page impressions by time zones. Now for a start, I didn't realise how many different time zones there are (a staggering 32 since you ask), so to see our users placed in a global context is really interesting.

Unsurprisingly, most people visit the site from within the GMT zone:

But what is surprising, is that we get page impressions from every single time zone on the planet (I don't know whether we can track views from space...)

So from the smallest number, the very exotic looking Cocos Islands (13 page impressions), to the biggest, GMT (820,783) there's a whole world of fundraising all taking place on Justgiving.com. Isn't the internet great!

Here's the full list of stats from the last week (if you're really interested):

Another one to note is that there are almost 100,000 page impressions from the US alone. A very special relationship...

So remember, people can donate on Justgiving from anywhere in the world using their own credit/debit card. We process all donations in pounds sterling (£ GBP) but an overseas donor would have their currency converted by their card issuer. See help for more details.

101 Posts!

I didn't realise it at the time, but yesterday's post was the 100th on our Charities Blog! It's been a long time since we started it way back in June 2006, and a lot of stories have been blogged about in that time.

The whole objective of the blog has changed a bit too, so it's maybe a good time to illuminate you on what that objective actually is, since you probably don't know, or haven't realised...

So what is the point of this blog? Very simply, to let you (our member charities) know how the site works, how and when we improve it, and how you can get the most out of it.

To do that (well, to hope to do that) we try to post a couple of times each week:

• on case studies, best practice and charity sites of the month to inspire you
• on service updates to communicate with you
• on hints & tips to help you
• on Fundraiser topics and newsworthy things, er, just because you might be interested

Which is about it I suppose. The traffic is improving every month, so we must be doing something right , but you can take our snazzy survey (or just comment) if you disagree!

And as a treat, here's a selection of some of the most popular posts:   

• How to let your fundraisers know about Justgiving   
• The First ever Widget   
• The new Widget   
• Our Facebook Application   
• Outstanding Supporter Care – Breakfast Talk   
• The First Ever Charity Website of the Month   
• Yorkshire Air Ambulance raises £190,000 in 7 days

Plus, if you're interested in what the company as a whole does, head on over to our Fundraiser blog. It's just like this one, except aimed at sponsors, donors, fundraisers or just anyone who's interested about us and what we do.

The best thing about that blog (out of many great things) is that I get to post pictures of food on it, as I doubt any charities are interested in that sort of thing here (Ed. who says anyone else is?)...

And why the cake? Well, I celebrate 2 years at JG tomorrow, so I thought I'd treat myself :-)

Shackleton Foundation - site of the month

Last week I was pointed* in the direction of the Shackleton Foundations' page on Justgiving because they had a great description of what they do at www.justgiving.com/shackletonfoundation

Here it is:

Thank you for visiting the Shackleton Foundation's Justgiving website. Donating online is safe, secure, and very much appreciated. The money you donate goes straight into our bank account and helps us get towards that vital £10 million goal for the Shackleton Foundation.

This will help us all leave a lasting legacy to the great man. We think that assisting those who embody the spirit of Shackleton, by giving charitable grants to pioneering individuals or groups in any field, is the way to do this. People whose projects and aims are bold, innovative and useful no matter the age, class, colour or gender: we'll be in touch.

In the meantime, thanks again for your donation, please continue to visit our website http://www.shackletoncentenary.org and join our facebook group to keep up to date with what we're doing, and tell all your colleagues, friends and family to do the same!

This is a little longer than I'd normally suggest, but the charity are only using the Justgiving donation facility from their own website at www.shackletoncentenary.org and don't need to worry about how it would appear on fundraising pages.

It's a great precis of what they do and why they use Justgiving - definitely the best use of a description to communicate with supporters I've seen in a long time.  And it's also a good idea to promote the ways of keeping in touch, like Facebook and their website (unfortunately you can't hyperlink from the description at the moment).

What I also noticed on their website (and helped with the awarding of site of the month) were the links below to three of the most popular "social media" type websites:

Here they are on the three sites:

Flickr

Facebook

YouTube

As I said, the three sites above are incredibly popular, but more importantly free! Why don't you use them?

Just looking through them now I feel I have a great idea about what the charity is doing. Especially after reading some of the great posts from their various blog categories.

You can subscribe to their blog feed here and read about subjects ranging from The birth of an iceberg, to The Top Ten Things to take to the Pole! I've added them to my RSS reader and will be keeping up to date with their progress.

It's really interesting, and full of info about the Shackleton Centenary, which is:

In 2008-09 we intend to follow in our ancestors' footsteps, and recreate the 1909 Nimrod Expedition, originally intended to be the first mission to the South Pole.

Here's the video from their YouTube site of someone else getting to the Geographical and Ceremonial South Pole as a taster of what they'll be training for. Looks kinda cold...

Keep up the good work, and keep posting guys!

Update 14th Nov - here's what they had to say about this.

*By the now sadly departed for New Zealand Josie 

Welcome pack PDFs

I announced the launch of our Welcome Pack a couple of weeks ago, and they should have all been sent out by now. If you haven't got one, please let me know and I'll send one to you.

Or you can just download PDF versions by clicking on the links below:

Download raise_more_money_1.pdf

Download raise_more_money_2.pdf

Download were_here_to_help_1.pdf

Download were_here_to_help_2.pdf

Due to the way it was formatted for printing, the last two sections are together in two files:

Download charity_account_and_your_money_1.pdf

Download charity_account_and_your_money_2.pdf

And as for the initial feedback, it's been great - 95% of people surveyed (82 so far) have said that the pack gave them a better understanding of the Justgiving service!

I'll do a more detailed post when all the feedback is in, but for a taster, here's one answer to the question "what was best about the pack?":

Clear, concise and informative.  Although we have been using Just Giving for some time - it was useful to have the pack to update ourselves and for clarification around the services you offer.

But my favourite responses so far have been, strangely, to the question of what was worst about the pack! Here's three gems:

It just fell off the shelf and nearly hit me on the head!!
I've got to decide where to put it now
Purple and green. A bit too Wimbledon... And not great with a hangover.

So a first summary is that it's pretty good. Unless, that is, your shelves are quite full, you don't have a filing cabinet and you do have a hangover...

Tell us what you think

Today's post is quite simply a poll, albeit a quite snazzy looking one.
Please take a second to vote so we know what you like (and, more importantly, what you don't). Thanks!

And if you have any specific feedback, please let me know!