Today is a day of celebrations at JG Towers as we celebrate the one year birthday of the Justgiving widget!
If you're not sure (or can't remember) what they are, it's basically a mini version of a fundraising page that can be posted almost anywhere on the web - fundraising progress is automatically updated and it shows the three most recent donor comments. Click on "share this page" on any fundraising page to find out how to add one
Here's the widget for Will Young's fundraising page:
And here's a screenshot of one at www.qhotels.co.uk/hikinghoteliers
A quick history lesson
Justgiving was the first service to offer a UK fundraising widget powered by an RSS feed back in January 2007 (the old widget, left), prior to this flash version being released on July 24th last year.
Now for some stats...
It's quite hard to get some accurate stats for how many new widgets are out there, but the old widget has generated a whopping 6,895,915 page impressions over the last 12 months.
The high number is mainly due to widgets being posted on a few high traffic sites like two (over here and over there) very popular sites for fans of Jonas Armstrong (!). But in that time, there have been nearly 20,000 old widgets out in the wild, and we estimate that there are many more new widgets.
**Update 25th July - the pages on Justgiving where people access the widget code have been viewed well over 40,000 times, and it's fair to say that a large proportion of them actually used the widget - which is then seen by thousands more (the Dan Radcliffe fan site is one of our top referrers because of the widget there).**
Taking the percentage of page impressions due to the old widget over the past year and applying it to last week for the new widget, we reckon that widgets were on web pages viewed around 150,000 times in the last week.
What we can't track (yet)
How many donations have come via widgets. This would be great to know, but it's hard enough to track (reliably) the number of widgets on the web and how many times they are being seen as it is. That's one for widget 3.0 I'm afraid...
It was a real birthday, we even made bought a cake
Yes, to celebrate this birthday, myself and our analyst John, mixed two of our favourite things (the internet & cake) to make this lovely widget cake - or *widgecake* as we have coined it:
Now that's what I call an RSS feed [groan].
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