The Justgiving charities blog

Charity account refresh

Yesterday, we released quite a few text updates to the Charity Account to make it easier to use. We'd had feedback that a lot of the different areas were not as clear as they could be, plus we've re-vamped the whole "Marketing resources" section and re-named it Fundraising resources:

You'll notice when you log-in that it's not just the name of the section that's changed, there's now a Help and training section where you can find out about webinars, our welcome pack and here - the blog!

Plus, we've added a very helpful bit to the Buttons and logos section, so that when you click on the button you want, it gives you the html code you can use on your website that will link to your charity's area on Justgiving:

So if I copy that code (from logging-in as the Demo Charity) into the blog here, I get this:

Clever, huh!

Here's the new-look Fundraising & donations section, where you can create reports on fundraising pages, direct donations and edit thank-you messages:

Plus, there's a re-written Account management area, where you can add new users, change your email address...

...and subscribe to our email alerts, or to our fantastic newsletter:

To see all the new changes though, it's best just to have a look round yourself - there are lots of little things you may notice have been re-written or updated, but it would be a very dull blog post that listed them all...

Payment reports have changed

***Update 5th June - get help on formatting payment reports here***

As we announced last week, the way payment reports are generated has now changed - they are generated much faster, but without column selection and renaming features.

To help you out, we've produced demo reports for both donation and Gift Aid payments that you can download below, as well as all the field definitions:

Download justgiving_payment_reports.xls

We've also commissioned an external developer to replicate the column selection and renaming features we no longer support in a custom Excel file. We hoped that this would be ready today, but we've not finished testing it, so it should be released in the next few days.

Look out for announcements here, and in the Charity Account about that update, as we hope to have something we can give you that will help with the change.

We had to make this change to speed up report generation and improve the site's performance, but we are trying to give you something that will replicate the loss of functionality and help you manage your reports.

Payment reports are changing...

***Update 5th June - get help on formatting the reports here***

*Update 29th May - the reports have now changed  - read more*

As a lot of you will know, we've not provided the best of service for payment reports over the last couple of months. They have been available again for over a month, we've said sorry, and now we're trying to make them better again.

Reports will soon be much quicker to generate

So that's good news for those of you who spend a lot of time staring at the Justgiving dog and the dove of data...(trust me, we do know how you feel).

Is there a catch?

Unfortunately, yes. To enable us to generate these reports quicker, and to minimise any effect they may have on the site in general, from Thursday 29th May, you will no longer be able to customise the reports before you generate them.

That means no column selections and no column renaming.

You will only be able to download a report in Excel and CSV with every column selected (apart from two that will no longer be included)*. Just like the ones below:

 Download example_donation_payment_report.xls

**UPDATE 28th May - we now have a Gift Aid report example too**

(The Gift Aid report no longer includes a "message from donor" column, and the "Net Donation minus Estimated VAT" column [BS] has been changed to "Net Gift Aid minus Estimated VAT" so you can add up that column and it will give you the approximate total paid to your charity.)

 Download example_gift_aid_payment_report.xls  

We know that this is going to make some of your lives a bit harder again. So we're trying our best to build something that will replicate the custom functionality in Excel, because this change is going to happen soon...

Since it is *urgent* for us to implement this to ease the strain on our servers from so many reports and ensure we don't have to turn them off, all reports will come like this from Thursday 29th May.

As I said, we are working every day to try and find/build another way of providing the same functionality, and we'll keep you updated on this.

The technical reason

Up to now, we have allowed you to customise the reports to include any number of columns, and column names. This meant that every report was generated on the fly - searching the database for all the info from those select columns.

Now that we will give you a fixed report, we can index the database so that it accesses the information much quicker - more than 50% quicker, in fact.

Are we providing any help?

As above, we're trying as best we can to minimise the work that you will need to do, so watch out for some webinars, videos and help sheets in the next week...

More info on our finance processes can be found here.

*the two columns that will no longer appear in this report are "Gift Aid Payment Reference" and "Gift Aid Payment Reference Date", normally columns BR and BS. They have been taken out as they meant the reports were much slower to download - and since they would only include data 6-8 weeks after a payment report (when Gift Aid is repaid) we thought they were not essential.

From comment to case study: Cycle India & Heal

Matthew from Cycle India left a comment on a recent post that read:

Just a quick message to say our charity found using Justgiving for our recent Cycle India event was very worthwhile. We raised around £100k for our small charity - www.heal.co.uk

We're now planning another event and will be recommending all cyclists to have a Justgiving page, and only take payments this way.

I was intrigued by this, so got in touch with Matthew to find out a bit more about what they did, and why it was successful.

What does your charity do?

We have a project called the HEAL’s Children Village, where we look after around 200 orphaned or under-privileged children. The children are around 5 – 16 years old and live in  one of 10 bungalows, each with its own ‘house mother’ who takes care of them.

We also fund the Poverty Trap Project which educates children in nearby villages who do have parents but they can’t afford to send their children to school.

We normally get £50k in a year, which can go a long way - everyone who works for the charity are volunteers so almost 99% of all donations gets spent on our projects and we want the money raised from the cycle 2010 event to go to new projects.

What is your event?

Our event is Cycle India, which in January 2008 raised £100K, mainly through Justgiving. We had 22 cyclists, plus some Americans and Indian people joined in. We're planning a new Cycle India 2010 now, for up to 30 cyclists.

Why did you decide to use Justgiving for your event?

I sponsored friends using the service and found it very easy and simple to use. I liked how each fundraising page described where the money was going and showed a personal message by the fundraiser.

 Was it successful and would you use it again?

We raised £25k from the Justgiving pages, so it was only about a quarter of overall revenue. However, we raised around £25k in T-Shirt sponsorship, and Prasad the Founder did a fantastic job on his own with contacts, which made up a big slice.

We also raised £5,500 from registration fees and did a few fundraising parties. So, as far as straight sponsorship it was probably around 50/50 this time. The fundraisers with a Justgiving page significantly raised more.  

[Jonathan's ears prick up...] That's interesting, can you say how much more people raised on Justgiving? Do you know what the percentage is?

I’ve checked through the figures and those that embraced Justgiving did better overall – roughly £1,000 more. But many of these used both methods, such as myself or Prasad  whilst many others, like Debbie, did really well too.

Thanks, what lessons have you learnt for the next event?

I raised around £6k myself and I think it was my ‘polite email reminders’ to friends that helped - including one saying ‘you are the only person who hasn’t sponsored me…’ and within the day everyone had sponsored me!

I will stress/encourage all cyclists to have their own personal page on Justgiving.

How will you be promoting the event and why should people enter?

I have written a blog specifically for it and will be posting all FAQs the cyclists may have so other people can use it to get information and leave comments, which I think will help the cyclists get to know each other before the event.

I'll also use the charity's website and every cyclists will have a link from their fundraising page on the blog, with a ‘top fundraisers’ list to promote competitiveness and motivate the donors.

Do you have any more comments?

Initially we (our treasurer and myself) were very concerned about the charges. But we found we were far better off using Justgiving as it was a very difficult task working out the exact amount of Gift Aid we could claim, and many donors had not left their addresses to claim the Gift Aid.

The treasurer was negative to begin with but is now convinced Justgiving is "the way to go", it’s so "easy" for them on an admin front and they "couldn’t fault the system".

So thanks Matthew for taking the time to fill us in on your experiences,  we hope the Cycle India event in 2010 is even more successful than this year!

And if anyone else has a great fundraising success story they'd like to share, leave a comment below or get in touch.

**Update** here's how the story is told on the Cycle India blog.

The irresistible rise of online giving coincides with more trust in charities

In today's Third Sector, there are three stories that need mentioning here - the first is an in depth report into The irresistible rise of online giving, another says Public trust on the increase and there's the call to Forge a lasting relationship with donors on the web.

You need to register on Third Sector to read all three, or you can take in some the highlights below from the in depth report by Helen Barrett, which starts:

Sponsorship websites are reporting record profits, with charities also reaping the benefits. Is it all too good to be true?

She does go on to list a number of reasons why it isn't too good to be true (as you'd expect us to say!):

Small charities that rely on events fundraising achieve significant cost savings through the sites. Online transactions mean cash from supporters is received immediately rather than after the event. The sites pass money to the charity within a week and reclaim Gift Aid on their behalf.

For example, Justgiving's fee - 5 per cent of a donation plus Gift Aid - is taken at the end of the process and from the Gift Aid element, making income virtually risk-free for charities.

The charity examples shown are also familiar:

Helen Yates, chief executive of [Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre], says Justgiving has transformed its control over cash, reduced the cost of processing Gift Aid and liberated staff to do other things.

You can read more about their story in a previous post on How a small charity raised over £237K with Justgiving.

Our Managing Director, Anne-Marie Huby, is also quoted with her thoughts on online giving:

"We are a company, but we put social dividends above long-term profit...
Our users want to be empowered, to organise themselves for the causes they care about and delight in doing so."

In a similar vein to a recent piece another colleague, Tom Mansell, wrote about Social Media in Professional Fundraising, the story continues:

Charities should not underestimate the popularity of social networking tools, says Huby. Late last year, online community Facebook took over from Google as the number one route by which fundraisers and donors arrived at Justgiving. This small fact, she says, is highly indicative of how people are behaving online.

To illustrate that fact, for the period of 12th - 18th May this year, 8% of all visitors to the site came from Facebook compared to 4% from Google. That is a huge change from the same time last year, with Facebook referrers increasing by almost 1000%:

Charities are increasingly adopting these social networking tools to target new donors for popular annual events. St Michael's Hospice in Harrogate, for example, set up a dedicated page on Justgiving for its annual Jailbreak event, which sees local business people locked in prison until they raise enough money to bail themselves out.

The event's dedicated page included a gallery on photo- sharing site Flickr.

You can read more about Flickr on Justgiving here, but Tina Holroyd, head of fundraising at St Michael's Hospice, added:

"The business people that took part were able to email their entire contacts lists with a link to the page, with all the technology in place for an instant donation. And the money arrived on the same day."

The last word is left to Liz Goodey, head of research at the Charities Aid Foundation:

"I don't think there's any more risk with online fundraising than with any other fundraising method. Online fundraising is used instead of knocking on doors with a paper form, not as well as.

There's no evidence to suggest that there are more requests simply because requests are online, and no evidence at all that its popularity is declining."

So are the three stories linked?

Well, online giving keeps growing year after year and so much of our lives (social networking, buying products, reading news, just about everything and anything) takes place online that it's only going to grow further.

The relationships with donors and supporters that begin online (be it through a donation or a charity's website form), or are taken online, can be nurtured and developed using all those things that people use the internet for, and in the places that people go online.

If people have an online *space* that they call their own and if the charity updates them on their work in that *space* or see the fruits of their donations in the charity's *space* then trust and mutually rewarding relationships can follow.

It's all about us

Normally, we don't like to talk *too* much about ourselves on this blog (although you may disagree), but sometimes it's only right and proper. So today, you might have seen a new About us section on the website.

We've redone this area to try and make it clearer to visitors to how the site started and what we do, how the site works, and how we make money.

So the whole thing started with an idea, back in 1999...

...and you can follow a timeline all the way to 2008:

What we've also tried to do is explain to people how our fee works better - both in diagrams and in video:

Justgiving Fees - Explained in Video!

We hope you like it! :-)

But there's more! You can find out what we all look like (if you're brave) and what all we do here. Apparently I'm best described as being about "haikus, puns and marble backed graphs". Which I guess is true if I wear T-shirts like this one...

So if people want to work here, or contact us, they're also well served. We hope it gives all the info you'd need to find out what you want to know about us! 

Results of our last charity survey

Back in November 2006, we announced our first big survey of charity clients and we then reported back the findings in December 2006.

This year we held the same survey in February and are only now getting round to telling you what you told us (it's been a very busy last couple of months and we missed the initial deadline for a pre-Christmas survey - oops!).

If you want to see how we compared to last time on 14 KPIs (key point indicators), you can see the presentation slides below. The things to know beforehand are:

• We used an outside agency to do in-depth interviews with a variety of charity clients in November 2006 to identify 14 KPIs that we should measure ourselves against
• All the answers (213) are from charities who had 10 or less fundraising pages at the time of asking (February 2008)
• There were not enough responses from charities with more than 10 fundraising pages to draw any conclusions or provide unbiased results.

| View | Upload your own

Overall, there are a number of things we're doing well, and other things that can still improve. In fact, on average we're scoring 9% higher over all questions than last time.

But according to the Harvard Business Review, we're doing best on The One Number You Need to Grow, which is whether your customers would recommend your service:

That's great, but that doesn't tell the whole story, nor would it if I listed the quotes like below:

I've been so pleased with Justgiving, that I now pay a donation to a small charity I support on the basis that they use the donation to subscribe to Justgiving.

Justgiving makes life so much easier for our supporters and for us which allows us to spend time on what matters.

We try to keep on doing the things well that we undoubtedly do, but we're more interested in areas where we can improve. And the main theme was reporting, with others on getting back to people sooner when they ask us questions:

Help with reconciling gross and net amounts raised per fundraiser in order to simplify record keeping and book keeping!

I am more than satisfied with your service. The only comment I would make is that your accounting reports are very complicated.

So what have we done about all this then?

To try and address these issues, we made the payment report generation easier and more intuitive,  hired another member of staff to work on our helpdesk (the lovely Natalie) and added an estimated costs feature to the charity account.

We're also in the midst of a project to rewrite a lot of the instructions in the account to make it easier to find out how it works, and working on implementing a new helpdesk service that will help us manage your questions better.

But although we've addressed these issues, we didn't plan for the interruption to reports that happened last month - that was not good. And there will be more changes coming to reporting soon too that will help speed up their generation, albeit with less flexibility.

What's the point of telling you this?

What we mean to show by telling you all of this is that we're aiming to be open - we're not perfect, but we're trying to address (and already have, in some cases) those imperfections to help us serve charities as best we can.

Also, well done to Jo, Neil, John, Pam and Natalie who all won Amazon vouchers for taking the time to fill out our survey. OK, it was a while in coming, but it did come in the end, so thanks!

Dreamforce, Salesforce, Salesforce Foundation & Justgiving

A couple of my colleagues and myself have spent the last two days at the awesome Dreamforce Europe conference, for users of Salesforce.com. If you've not heard of Salesforce before, it's a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that we (and 40,000 + companies in the world) use to manage relationships with our clients.

Now this was not your normal bland, boring conference. Not when the flamboyant CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, is there speaking alongside the likes of Stelios, Peter Gabriel and Jimmy Wales (founder of a little known encyclopaedia website called Wikipedia...) about "The Future of Software" and "The Internet As A Platform For Changing The World".

It was all hugely inspiring stuff and I've come away with lots of ideas of how we can use Salesforce internally to really help the charities who use Justgiving, but also how charities themselves can use Salesforce.  And for this, there is the Salesforce Foundation:

The Salesforce Foundation harnesses the power of product and people to improve the lives of those in need. Using a unique 1/1/1 model—1% Time, 1% Equity, and 1% Product—the Foundation reaches out to the community and increases the effectiveness of non profit organizations so they can better achieve their goals. We call this the Power of Us.

And it's 1% product part that I'd like to focus on - for if you go here you can apply for up to 10 free (or apply for additional) licences, watch a demo, or take a free trial of the service.

Let me repeat that:

If you are a charity, you can get this amazing tool for free.

So if you are a small charity looking to implement a fundraiser/donor relationship tool, it's really a *no-brainer*. We pay for the service, do hugely customised and complicated things and think it is amazing, and you can get all of that for no cost!

Plus, you can work with Salesforce's partners to help you implement it - because a large number of the companies who build custom applications for Salesforce for paying subscribers like us, also donate their time through the "Power of Us" of the Foundation.

So why are we plugging Salesforce?

Well, it would make it easier for us to integrate fundraising and donation data from Justgiving with charities who use Salesforce, since we already use it ourselves. That would enable you to have a 360 degree view of all your (online and offline) fundraising, donor contacts, campaigns, mailing lists, and all the other stuff you do (e.g. finance) online. In one place. In one web browser.

Update **to clarify the above, there is no solid integration yet, it is in discussion**

And, er, it's just brilliant.

But seriously, we see the whole point of Justgiving as a similar service - where Salesforce is "software as a service", we try to be "fundraising as a service". And our future aim is to be even more like the platforms Marc Benioff referenced in his keynote below:

So for more info on the Foundation, go to their site, or visit the non-profit message boards at the Salesforce community pages.