The Justgiving charities blog

Sorry for the interruption to reports

We know that we’ve caused a lot of frustration this month by limiting access to the payment reports. Here with an apology and an explanation is our Chief Technology Officer, Dom Lacey.

So Dom, tell us, what happened?

We noticed that we were starting to get some donation time-out alerts (where donations weren’t being processed because they were taking too long) due to the heavy traffic on the site.

We decided to suspend access to our payment reports temporarily, to create more space on our servers and make sure we could process all donations successfully.

Why did that happen?

The payment reports were pulling data from our database at the same time as the donation data was being written to the database. Due to the fact that more people were running more reports than normal, and the reports themselves were also bigger than normal, there were conflicts between the data that reports were accessing and the new data being created by donations.

So we had to decide whether to report on past donations and lose donations that were being made, or to process all donations and report on them later. We decided on the latter option, as our top priority is always making sure that people can donate to charities.

We have to admit that we didn’t plan ahead here. It hadn’t occurred to us that this year’s earlier marathon would coincide with heavier use of the charity account as charities tied up their year end accounts. It was poor planning from us. We’re really sorry and we’ll learn from it.

What are we doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

We’ve started work on three different projects to ensure this doesn’t happen next year.

1. We’ll pay more attention to the timing of the marathon and make sure reports are available during the end of March/early April.

2. We’ll separate the reporting database from our live database so there won’t be repeat of those data conflicts between reports and donations.

3. We’re re-thinking how we offer reports. We need to look how they are powered, generated and offered to charities. It may be that offering some reports in real time isn’t feasible, but we’re discussing ways of doing this to find the best solution for everyone.

Could you give us an analogy in layman’s terms?

OK, so imagining our database is the engine that drives the website, what we are planning to do is create a separate engine for reporting and - potentially - put it in a quicker, more reliable and more robust car!

Dom, thanks for this explanation. I know you and your team have worked extremely hard to make the best of a bad situation.

Yes, we tried to keep in contact with the charities team and to pass on updates as soon as there was any news.

We’re aware of the frustration we’ve caused to the charities we serve and we are genuinely sorry, as well as being determined to learn from our mistakes and engineer a better solution moving forward.

If you have any questions, please email me at jonathan@justgiving.com

Person-to-Person fundraising update

On April 15th, I blogged about Person-to-Person fundraising in reply to a question posed by Peter Deitz of the About Micro Philanthropy blog.

He asked the question, "Is Person-to-Person Fundraising Dead, or Just Getting Started?" and invited people to send in their opinions for him to publish at the end of the month.

If you pop over to his blog now, you'll see he's posted a collection of all the responses.

As well as my answer (yay!), there are some really interesting points made by a wide variety of people.

Go on, take a read, see what people are saying. And feel free to put up your *thoughts* here, or there, or on your own blog. Or, hell, just tell the person sitting next to you. This is person-to-person after all!

I had the pleasure of meeting Peter the other day (I've been visiting our Firstgiving counterparts in Boston to find out more about the US nonprofit scene) and I was really impressed with the vision for his Social Actions project, described in his own words:

Social Actions helps individuals and organizations use social media to plan, implement, and support peer-to-peer social change campaigns.

And that's not really too dissimilar from the original goal of why Anne-Marie and Zarine set up Justgiving - to enable people to join together and raise more money than they thought possible, quickly, easily and efficiently, for the causes they care about.

Fundraising page estimated cost

One of the top queries to our helpdesk recently has been about working out the net total raised by a fundraising page, i.e. the amount raised on a page minus our 5% transaction fee, the VAT on our fee and the debit/credit card fee (see here for more detail).

This used to be quite complicated to work out, requiring you to look at many different donation and Gift Aid payment reports and to do some manual calculation and manipulation of the data we provide.

But that wasn't deliberate on our part, it was only due to the nature of how our finance processes work - for every donation that is eligible for Gift Aid, we pay that in full to the charity straight away and only take our fee from the Gift Aid payment we subsequently make, which can be up to 6-8 weeks after the donation was made.

And if a donation isn't eligible for Gift Aid, we take our fee out of that donation. Our processes can therefore appear fairly complicated because of that difference.

Thankfully, it's not that complicated any more!

We've just released an easy way to see the gross and estimated net donation figures for a fundraising page using the fundraiser quick search function.

Here's how...

When you log-in to the Charity Account, enter the person's name who's page you're looking for in the search box on the first screen as below:

You can then click on the person's name to see a summary of their fundraising:

When you click on "See sponsorship to this page" you will then see a list of all donations, plus the estimated fees charged for each donation, and a total for the page:

You'll notice that, as above, we tell you why these fees are only estimated:

These fees are estimated because we can only calculate the exact fees after we have successfully reclaimed Gift Aid on a donation and paid it to your charity (which can be 6-8 weeks after a Gift Aid claim is made).

And even when we do pay the Gift Aid over, it may not be possible to get an true exact figure for a page: this is because we don't charge VAT on our transaction fee for each donation, the VAT is charged on the total fees per payment we make to you.

So if a payment to you includes donations from more than one fundraising page, the total VAT charged would have to be split per donation, and that may mean small rounding errors occur (but these would be discrepancies of pence, not pounds!).

But this new feature will give you as close as you will get to the exact figure for a page, so if you, or your fundraisers, would like to know exactly how much your charity has received thanks to their fundraising efforts, you can find out in less than a minute!

More information on how our (sometimes straightforward, sometimes complicated) payment processes can be found here, including documents and easy to follow diagrams.

Payment reports are back up

We’re glad to say that you can download your customisable payment reports from your Charity Account again.

***Update, 30th April***

As so many people are now accessing the reports at the same time, they are taking longer than normal to be generated. You should not be experiencing any time-outs, but please be patient when downloading reports or try running them early in the morning or in the late afternoon.

They may take longer, but this will only be for the short term - and you can read how we are planning to improve this in future here.

***End of update***

As you may know, we suspended the ability to download payment reports during the London Marathon peak because our servers couldn't support the heavy website traffic combined with the increased usage of bigger-than-normal reports (due to many charities needing to download lots of reports to close the books at year end) all at the same time.

For this, we are sorry. Really, really sorry. We realise this has caused a lot of frustration for a lot of people and understand that over the last couple of weeks we have not provided the level of service that we normally do.

And that makes us angry. Angry because we care about what we do. We're passionate about helping people raise money online (and all that encompasses) and when we fall short of our reason for being, and our company values, that really frustrates us.

So quite simply, keeping the reports up would have meant people couldn't donate. But the root causes are a bit more complicated, so next week our CTO (up now here) will give you a full and detailed explanation of what happened, our decisions, and what we plan to do to prevent this in future.

And to give you some context for the traffic we had, below is a six-month graph showing the daily reach of Justgiving in comparison to Everyclick and Sport Relief (the most popular charity website according to the latest Hitwise report).

Person-to-Person Fundraising

At the beginning of the month, Peter Deitz of the About Micro Philanthropy blog, asked the question, "Is Person-to-Person Fundraising Dead, or Just Getting Started?". This was part of the Giving Carnival, which he describes as:

a monthly event that gathers the best blog posts on various topics related to Giving (philanthropy, charity, etc).

Since Peter referenced us, and the story the Guardian ran about Justgiving the other day, it seems only  fair that I return the favour and give our opinion (as our US company, Firstgiving, has).

Now it will come as no surprise to anyone that our response is that person-to-person fundraising is just getting started. Since Justgiving started in 2001, almost 5 million people have raised more than £260 million for over 4,700 charities.

But we have never helped our users raise as much money as in the last 7 days - more or less all of it down to the 15,000+ people raising money on the site for running the Flora London Marathon (officially the world's largest fundraising event, for which over £18 million, including Gift Aid, has been raised so far on Justgiving).

On Friday alone, we helped our users collect over £1 million in donations for the first time ever - March 2004 was the first time we'd helped people raise that much in just one month. That's some increase in donations, and shows how popular and widespread online person-to-person fundraising has become.

But these marathon runners are only the early adopters of person-to-person fundraising. In the last year we've seen a huge increase in the number of 'non-thon' fundraising pages - created by people doing more than just events, as I wrote about recently - from hymnathons to weddings, birthdays and doing nothing. And it's the same in the US too.

Plus, we're by no means the only ones who extol the *personal* aspect of fundraising: over on the Extreme Fundraising blog, Marc A. Pitman agrees, with his post Fundraising Secret #15: People Give to People. And whilst he writes in reference to people and direct mail, and not people-to-people fundraising per se, it still rings true...

When public trust in charities is apparently falling, giving money to people you know and trust who are raising money for a particular charity could become more effective than any direct mail a charity produces.

And that's not just our biased view. Read how Andrew Cates, Chief Executive of SOS Children's Villages, writes that their charity sent no direct mail in the whole of 2007 and "why internet fundraising is so cool".

So many charities produce guides for "A-Z fundraising ideas", where pretty much all of the ideas involve some sort of person-to-person fundraising - all of which can be done online with the minimum of fuss and maximum gain for the people and the charities involved.

To sum up, we're constantly amazed by the imagination of people who use our site to raise money for the causes they hold dear, through the people they know and love, and the unstoppable enthusiasm and creativity they bring means we're confident that this is by no means a passing fad.

You can see more examples of the wide range of person-to-person fundraising that takes place on the Justgiving website in our JG: A-Z (or, er, A-G as we've got up to so far) series of posts...

Justgiving's Tom on Social Media

If you've read this week's edition of Professional Fundraising, you'll have seen our very own head of client services, Tom Mansel, give his thoughts on social media and how charities can use it.

Or, as PF put it rather more alliteratively, if you're myopic about MySpace, terrified of Technorati, frightened of Facebook, Tom's the man with the social media plan...

A few pieces of advice from his awesome article are copied and pasted below:

DO find out who – and where – your supporters are, and start conversations with them
DO be clear on your objectives.
DO be prepared to lose some control
DON’T ban it
DON’T strive for perfection
DON’T obsess about your website

If that has piqued your curiosity and you'd like to read all of Tom's recommendations, go to the Professional Fundraising website.

Newbie Natalie

In addition to the fantastic Gemma and lovely Liz, we now have newbie Natalie working on our charities helpdesk. With Liz and Gemma, she (wo)mans the phones and email inbox from Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm and is there to answer any charity queries.

I asked Natalie why she wanted to work at Justgiving:

I've always felt my path was somewhere in the charity sector, and this came to light even more whilst I was living in Uganda.

After returning to the UK, and making the step to move to the big smoke, I realised I would need to be involved with the third sector to be happy and develop professionally.

I think the idea behind Justgiving is genius [Ed - you'll fit in well] and was keen to be involved with the company since it helps charities to raise the money required for the invaluable work they do.

So far I've really enjoyed communicating with charities and helping them to achieve the most from their relationship with Justgiving.

And to give you a chance to get to know Natalie a bit better, we've got a, er, photo of some fish she (allegedly) cooked the other day. Apparently it was quite tasty:

Plus, we've asked her the traditional tough questions that all JG newbies need to take...

Where would you like to live?

Somewhere with mountains, sun sea and sand…with a lake nearby!

What would your super power be?

An attached magic carpet

What is your favourite book?

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski (quite highbrow, our Nat)

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Lovely, mint, you're kidding me, I’m hungry! (as probably never heard together in the sentence, "Lunchtime's over? You're kidding me! I'm still hungry. Got any lovely mints?)

What kind of biscuit would you be?

A Lindt chocolate covered shortbread with raisins, cranberries and macadamia nuts.

What's your secret talent?

I can tap dance! (I think we need footage)

Lastly, tell us one thing about you that we'd only ever find out if we gave you one of these silly questionnaires...

When I was a wee bairn my nana was pushing me home in a pram. She had lots of shopping and approaching the road she decided to take me out and put the shopping in…

She crossed the road, a car came whizzing along and crashed into the pram - shopping went everywhere (but I was probably still asleep). It’s a miracle!

So, when she's not tap-dancing, or cheating death, Natalie (and Liz and Gemma) can be contacted on 0845 021 2133 or charities@justgiving.com. Welcome to the team!

JG to offer donations by thought

We've today announced a prototype of our new way of taking donations - by thought alone. Our Head of Unlikely Developments, Piral Lofos, explains:

Through the use of the latest emerging web 2.0 technologies, we are able to harness the mental energy so many people waste through using social networks, and connect with the part of the brain used to make transactions.

Of course, it does depend on people remembering their credit card numbers and mentally entering them into a virtual form.

Spriral hoped to have a working version by April 1st 2009, as there was one minor detail that needed to be worked on...

We haven't yet figured out how to reclaim Gift Aid on these yet.