The Justgiving charities blog

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.

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.

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.

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...

How a small charity raised over £237K with Justgiving

The Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre (MSRC) is one of Justgiving's oldest (joining us way back in 2002) and most effective clients who continue to raise more and more every year.

Why are they effective?

Well, we thought we'd ask them and find out exactly that. So, thanks to both Helen and Abi from MSRC, we've written a success story detailing the steps they take to help their fundraisers raise great amounts of money online - almost £250,000 for the Flora London Marathon (FLM) last year alone!

For example, constantly promoting online fundraising to their supporters is one key aspect:

In our charity, online fundraising IS Justgiving. We are hardcore Justgiving – we do not shut up about Justgiving, it’s just so effective for us.

And this is done through as many mediums as possible: Abi explains how they basically insist that all their FLM runners need to have a Justgiving page. They do this by email, telephone, face to face and in offline fundraising packs.

We work on the principle that it is an expectation that anyone taking part in an event will set up a Justgiving page

In 2007, MSRC had 102 runners in the marathon, 88 of whom used Justgiving to fundraise. The runners who used Justgiving raised a net £2,000 each, smashing MSRC’s target of £1,500 per runner. Out of the lowest 15 performers, 14 didn’t have a Justgiving fundraising page.

Abi sent me an update on the 15th January, to give an indication of their fundraisers' progress this year:

We now have 76 of our runners with a Justgiving page, out of that 6 already have raised over the £1,500 (and we have received the sponsorship) and we have had nearly £24,000 in already!

Whilst the FLM is clearly very important for them, MSRC still take the same steps with their other events. The 2007 British 10K event was the best yet for MSRC as even though they only had four runners, they managed to raise 53% more than in 2006 using Justgiving.

And there is plenty of scope for more growth too – like pushing more unconventional ideas such as fundraising pages for birthdays or weddings, with the common theme is that it's all happening online. As Helen adds:

We’re continuing to phase out the paper end of fundraising as we believe online is where the future lies. Using Justgiving is a no-brainer for our charity – why would we use anything else?

To read the whole story, including more on their outstanding supporter care and where the future lies, download the success story PDF below:

Download MRSC_success_story.pdf

Blog review of the year - Part 2

Ready for part 2? I know you've been looking forward to it since the amazing part 1, and I don't like to disappoint...

April

With the Flora London Marathon taking place in April, it is always our busiest month of the year (over 14,000 pages for the FLM alone) but that didn't stop the blog: whilst at the expo, I met some great charities and a couple of true international fundraisers.

On the service update front, we announced new links for charities, gave direct donors the ability to leave messages, announced the start of our successful webinar program and gave you a new help section.

For fundraisers, we started the JG Clinic, promoted help on the forum and told how badges help raise money.

May

JG Towers moved in May, and that didn't stop the work either - we gave you our first charity breakfast talk, a new remember area on the site and announced updates to tables on fundraising pages.

Plus, one of our most popular posts, how to let your fundraisers know about Justgiving, saw the light along with a new help section and not one, but two posts on helping schools.

May also brought the arrival of Josie "The fish" B to our charities helpdesk. She's now sadly back in NZ, but at least I remembered her arrival (unlike Liz in part 1)...

We had another great website of the month, London's Air Ambulance and Cutty Sark Trust were in the news (replete with a lovely graph...) and we had a really nice email too!

June

In the summer we brought you some reviews and analysis (my fave thing) - first on the Cutty Sark Trust fundraising efforts and then on our webinar program - apparently I am "very friendly, approachable and not too technical [good for non IT wizards!]"

No bad eh! Things that were also on the good side of, er, good, included the "widget-tastic" charity website of the month, a great example of an email signature and an upgrade to our website security.

And although we couldn't help with the lousy summer weather, the clouds did part for the first JG Insider post, some more ideas for schools and a JG welcome to one of the biggest charities in the UK, the British Heart Foundation.

Blog review of the year - Part 1

Yes, it's that time of year when lazy copywriters review all the hard work they've done over 11 months to give themselves one easy month of re-writing old stories.

Having said that, a bit of reflection at this time of year is always nice, so here's the first part of my (four part) review of Justgiving's 2007...

January

The year started with a bang - the release of our very first widget! This was one of the most exciting developments we've ever, er, developed and it proved to be really successful (and it spawned a newer version later in the year... but you'll have to wait to hear about that).

Also in January, we released a new email tool to help supporters spread the word about their fundraising pages - email is still the most popular, and probably the most effective, way that fundraisers get people to sponsor them.

February

The second month of 2007 brought you the first, but by no means last, marble-effect graph showing you how you can raise 30% more for the marathon with Justgiving.

This was based on our sponsor survey which showed that when asked "If you hadn't been able to sponsor your friend online, what would you have done?" 31% of sponsors said they "would not have sponsored their friend at all"

Also in the news that month were great examples of using widgets and an improvement to the charity account.

March

Ah, here was when the blog really started to hot up and we began to post more content, more often.

Notable highlights included the first ever Charity Website of the Month award, the introduction of tagging on fundraising pages and the release of some new (and free) fundraising flyers.

In addition, we let you know how to have your fundraiser promoted on our home page.

You also had the unenviable task of reading my thoughts on how to create donor evangelists using widgets and blogs and see pictures and find out more about the inhabitants of JG Towers: I'm not as weird as the biog makes me sound (honest) but I'm clearly not as easy on the eye as Sophie :-)

****UPDATE 5th December****

I've been made aware of a glaring omission from January's highlights, that being the introduction of the all-knowing, all-powerful, generally amazing charity helpdesk person that is Liz (#2) Smith. (I hope that means she'll talk to me again...)

Outstanding Supporter Care – Breakfast Talk

Last week, we held another idea-sharing Breakfast Talk about Outstanding Supporter Care.

Lots of best practice examples from different charities were shared, highlighting the fact that the more your supporters enjoy their fundraising experience with your charity, the more they’ll want to raise and the more people they will tell about their experience!

Help your fundraisers:

The highlights from the discussion included VSO and the resources they make available on their website: an online fundraising pack and a fundraising ideas A-Z, amongst many others.

The offline resource created by Help the Hospices, entitled 'Making the best of Justgiving', is another great resource. It gets posted to all their fundraisers and Geoff Watson of the charity explained,

We hope our one-pager gives our supporters enough handy hints to ensure their Justgiving page works well for them. We've raised almost 50% more through Justgiving this year so far, so maybe the one-pager is working!

Download making_the_best_of_justgiving.pdf

Contact your fundraisers:

Médecins Sans Frontières’ robust contact strategy ensures no supporters fall through the cracks. Sam Knight from MSF contacts supporters as soon as their page is built, before the event itself and then after to say thank you.

Thank your fundraisers:

Thanking supporters for their efforts is essential, as one supporter said,

It gives me a lovely feeling knowing that I am doing this for the good of others. And it just confirms why I am doing it when I receive emails of thanks from the charity for the money I have raised.

Such a complete approach results in supporters coming back time and time again to raise funds for the charity.

A supporter care strategy works well for many charities. Here’s an example (click to enlarge):

Promote your fundraisers:

Featuring your supporters, both on your website and in your offline communications, is also a great motivator for them and others. The Samaritans do this very well as do the Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre (MSRC).

Abi Crawford from MSRC said,

We couldn't be more enthusiastic about Justgiving, and that's contagious when it comes to our fundraisers. Over the last 12 months we have seen real growth in our fundraising and Justgiving has played a very big part in that growth - for a smaller charity like MSRC that has made a very real difference!

Tell your fundraisers how they help your charity:

Lots of charities such as Comic Relief, GOSH and Asthma UK explain to supporters how their donations will be invested. This is crucial if you want them to fully engage with your charity and reassure them that their money is being put to excellent use.

Details of the full talk will soon be available in the Marketing Resources area of your charity account to download.

Many thanks to all charities who contributed to this session – they’ve shared some great examples of how to make the perfect supporter experience.

Making the most of your Justgiving service!

Last Thursday we were lucky to have Lucinda Cooper and Suzanne Fenwick from WaterAid at Justgiving towers, hosting the latest Breakfast Talk. The subject was how the charity has effectively utilised alternative revenue streams to achieve 2x growth online.

The discussion was lively and full of insightful learnings from WaterAid’s exploration of the 'occasions' market including events such as weddings, birthdays and anniversaries. WaterAid have also started promoting fundraising 'in memoriam'.

With people getting married later in life or for a second time and with the increase in civil partnerships, WaterAid has seen a boom in fundraising pages set up in lieu of weddings having 50 this year alone. Have a look at some examples here, here and here.

WaterAid actively promotes this service on its own website, using bold directive buttons to aid easy navigation for fundraisers to start fundraising quickly.

WaterAid keenly supports its page builders and helps them in any way they can whether it’s sending them posters, WaterAid DVDs to play at their wedding reception or sending out wedding gift cards that can be included with the wedding invites.

Christenings and birthdays are a popular means for fundraising too. Each donation to Charles’ 50th birthday page is at least £50!

Supporter care is extremely important to WaterAid and by making regular contact with their supporters, encouraging them and offering any support they might need pays dividends for the charity – supporters often come back raising money for different occasions and events!

A full summary of the talk will be posted on your charity account area later this week, or you can download it here: Download wateraid_talk.doc

We'd also love to thank WaterAid for hosting this talk!