The Justgiving charities blog

Feb Charity site of the month

This month we have the story of www.napac.org.uk, the website for The National Association for People Abused in Childhood

What's great about this site? Well, I've created a short video walk-through of their site to explain exactly why, but the most interesting thing is how this site came to be great (in my opinion)...

And the reason is that Helen from the charity saw our best practice webinar recording and decided to update their site - and they've already reaped the rewards.

Before you take a look at the video, I asked Helen a few questions about the site:

How did you come across the webinar recording?

I was sent an email on the 30th of January with the subject "New year solutions with Justgiving" - One of the articles featured the Best Practice Webinar recording and I decided to have a look...and I am so glad that I did!

Was it useful, would you recommend it?

It was so useful! I kept pausing every couple of minutes to make notes, jotted down all of the examples and tips...I ended up with two A4 sides of notes telling me exactly what I needed to do to give the donations part of our website a much needed face-lift. I would highly recommend it!

It's so clear, so simple and the tips absolutely work...having the Justgiving webinar to guide me meant that I didn't have to reinvent the "fundraising wheel" - all I had to do was use other people's past experience and knowledge and put it into practice on our website.    

Did it prompt you to update the fundraising area on your site?

I was already thinking that I needed to get around to sorting out the donations section of our website and watching this webinar was the catalyst I needed to get me moving. I spent a week completely re-building and re-writing the entire donations part of our website.

Has this update had any effect so far?

The day after it was launched a new Justgiving fundraising page was created! It was such a great feeling...the work I'd put in revamping the site was already showing it's benefits and our new supporter has raised £30 for us so far! I also knew about the importance of supporting our supporters so after being sent a notification of the new Justgiving fundraising page I was able to immediately email David Still and tell him how much we appreciated his support.

I was also able to add the widget for his fundraising page to our website so that everyone can see who our supporters are and what they're doing! The effect of the update so far has been incredible - I am working on a "making the most of your Justgiving webpage" document in eager anticipation of there being many more pages created in the near future!

Have you had any feedback on the site?

There hasn't yet been any feedback on the site updates but I'll soon be sending our a mass email to all of our supporters so that they can take a look - I'm sure this will result in some feedback!

Did you do all this yourself – was it easy to do?

I did all of the re-building and re-writing myself - but I had so many ideas from the webinar and the resources on the Justgiving website that I can't take any credit for it!

What was initially a daunting task was made so easy by the Justgiving team - and Jonathan took the time to look at what I'd done and gave me some constructive feedback so that I could make further improvements. 

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

The only thing I'd like to add is that it's well worth the investment of time to re-vamp the donations part of any charity website because you very quickly reap the benefits...plus it's great fun thinking of creative ways to get people to look at the donations part of the website.

So, check out the video (it's best to open the link in a new window) and see why their re-vamped site has already lead to one more fundraiser, and remember to watch the webinar recording yourself to learn how to do the same!

Justgiving charity site of the month Feb 2008 from Jonathan @ JG on Vimeo.

New sponsorship amount screen

Our techies have been a particularly busy bunch this week, especially Systems Dev Manager Jason (he of the Famous Friday Fact), and another feature they released was a change to the sponsorship amount screen.

If we click "sponsor me now" at www.justgiving.com/cycletocannes, for example, we'll see the screen below:

Instead of options for £100, £50, £20 or Other, what you see now are the five most recent donations and the five largest donations plus names and messages.

Having said that, if you've turned off the donation amount column, like on www.justgiving.com/olileech, only the latest donations are shown and the amounts do not appear:

We've been asked before whether we could enable custom amounts on fundraising pages, but we took the view that showing the most recent and top donations gives sponsors a better context for their donation.

The average donation on JG is about £34 (including Gift Aid), but some pages get lots of very large donations, and other pages get lots of smaller donations.

This new screen caters for both sets of pages because sponsors won't be put off by too high or too small ask amounts - they can just see the top and past donation amounts for that page, how much they are and then decide if they want to match those amounts or go higher or lower (and, er, pay their credit cards right...).

You can also see the fundraising page target and total donated if you want to help someone reach their goal, plus adding your name and message at the beginning makes this screen even more compelling and *sticky* (plus you can still change the amount and message on the last screen of the donation process).

Our stats told us that some people would drop off the donation process on the old sponsorship screen, but we hope this change means more people go from visiting a page to making a donation. Which means even more money gets to you, the charities!

Charity Search Improvement

Earlier in the month we brought you news of improvements to the 'sponsor a friend' search, and now it's time for the charity search to get an update too!

So now if I search for "cancer" from the homepage, this is what I will see:

What's changed?

• it's quicker and more relevant
• results are now weighted more towards the name of the charity
• charity descriptions are now searchable

And that's, well, it really. A simple, but very important task, made better.

Thanks, you really should have :-)

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Some might say they are the three most important things to say to a donor. And 1.8 million results for 'thank donors' on Google show thanking is something of a hot topic...

We all know giving thanks is good, and of the many scientific studies to prove it, one came to me recently courtesy of the excellent Daily Good newsletter and its Lesson in Thanks - the story is of a US psychologist in a high school, Jeffrey Froh, who encouraged students to show more gratitude.

The results? "Higher levels of optimism, increased life satisfaction, and decreased negative feelings" among the students apparently. So how do you make your donors feel the same way on Justgiving?

Well, everyone who makes a donation on the site gets a receipt that can include a thank-you message from you, the charity. It's very easy to set up too (as long as you have an admin log-in) - just log in to your charity account and go to the Fundraising & Donations area:

Once there, click on the Your Donation Thank-You Messages link and follow the process. Easy!

You can download an example of how that text appears to the donor here:

Download justgiving_thanks.txt

That message will be inserted automatically into the receipt for every single donor. But other donors may leave their contact details with you (some prefer to be anonymous) and you can send them a more personal thank-you as well.

By clicking on the Direct Donations or Event Fundraising links above, you could create reports to get a list of donors to either of those services, but it's maybe easier to download your weekly payment report to see who's made the most recent donations if you want to send an extra thank-you.

But that's just donors - don't forget to thank your fundraisers as well! To help with this you can subscribe to our page expiry alerts, or read our how other charities provide Outstanding Supporter Care.

Plus, remember that donors who give money direct to you can leave you messages too...

RSS on Justgiving - keep up to date easily

RSS - you heard of it? Possibly. Have you used it? Probably (without realising it, too).

What does it mean? Really Simple Syndication, apparently. But who cares about that? What it does and enables you to do is what's important.

There are plenty of other great posts out there that explain it in great detail, but in a nutshell, most people use RSS to draw lots of content and info from many different sources into one place.

Are you on Facebook? Do you hang on your mini-feed's every update? Well, that's just a collection of RSS feeds from all the profiles of your friends.  So instead of visiting all your friends profiles, you just watch the mini-feed come to you. It really is that simple.

Justgiving has had RSS feeds on the site for a while, and they are the brains behind our widgets - the widget is effectively a way of presenting the live feed from a fundraising page in a cool and funky way.

But it is the feed that transmits all the info the widget uses, info that can be read by any RSS reader.

Which, ahem, leads nicely onto RSS readers (aka RSS aggregators) and how to draw all your content together. There are lots of them out there, but two of the more popular are probably iGoogle and Netvibes (or you could jus use the Firefox browser).

Here are a couple of examples of what you can do on with both of them when you register for free:

On Netvibes...

Or iGoogle:

What I've added to both those examples are the feeds from the charities blog the status blog and our main Justgiving blog [well I had to really :-)], plus a feed from our Flickr site to keep you up to date with all things JG.

What's more interesting perhaps are the feeds from three random fundraising pages so you could keep on top of some or all of your fundraisers, checking how much they've raised.

To get the feed for a page, you just click on the RSS button under the donation totals, as shown below:

Quite a few phones come with RSS readers too these days, so you can even keep up to date with any fundraising page wherever you are - it's how I kept up to date with the Cutty Sark page.

I've also added a couple of feeds from two very interesting charity-centric blogs, not to mention the feed of the latest Fundraising news from Third Sector.

Both of those readers are very clever in that they let you share content, so you could add my JG example pages to your own iGoogle or netvibes page by clicking on this crazy Google link or lovely netvibes button below...

Also, you should take a look at the new BETA version of the BBC homepage - it's all based on RSS feeds from the different parts of the website and is a great example of a website giving its users control over what they see and how it's presented. More on that in the summer...

'Sponsor a friend' search improvement

We've now made it even easier to find a fundraiser on Justgiving by updating the 'sponsor a friend' search from our homepage. And it's a lot faster now too!

Here's what it looks like now if you search for "Jonathan":

As you can see, you're now presented with a lot more info about the fundraising pages - their image (where they have one), the url (web address), the name of the fundraiser and when they created it.

You'll also notice that if a page is set up with team members, or is in memory of someone, their names appear too. So it's now even easier to find the page you want to donate to!

This is also the same when you search for *all fundraisers* for your charity, like in the example below for  the fundraising area  of the Demo charity: www.justgiving.com/jgdemo/raisemoney