The Justgiving charities blog

Justgiving's *new* processing partner is… the *old* one

You may remember our recent announcement about a change in Justgiving’s payment processor.

You may or may not also recall the line in Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi where she sings, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.

That refrain would be an appropriate sentiment in this instance, because it turns out that the service provided by the new payment processor (RBS Lynk Inc - RBS) did not meet the bespoke requirements we agreed, nor did it match our high expectations or the promised levels of support.

Our technical team worked extremely hard to make the change happen, but it just wasn’t the better service that we believed it was going to be.

We’ve discussed our concerns at length with the senior management team at RBS and they’re looking at how they could offer us a better support structure in future.

What does this mean for Justgiving?

We’re switching back to our previous payment processing partner (Barclaycard Merchant Services - BMS) for the majority of donations made on Justgiving, with only a small percentage of donations being processed through RBS.

This is so we can compare the two services for the foreseeable future and ensure that we make the right decision on which one to partner with in the long term. It also means that, if one of the services is experiencing downtime, we can switch to the other and make sure all donations made on the site are processed successfully.

At the same time, BMS is investing heavily in its platform and aiming to launch a much improved offering in the coming months.

What does this mean for your charity?

Another change in the card fees. Some not so good, some *very* good. But again, we’ve negotiated hard to get the best possible fees for you.

All fees exclude the need to have Verified by VISA (VBV) or MasterCard SecureCode (MCSC) on our website (except for Maestro where it is mandatory). They are the fees that BMS charge us and that we pass on to charities at cost:

•    Credit cards (Visa/Mastercard) = 1.45% (previously 1.34% with RBS)
•    Business credit cards (new card rate) = 1.85%
•    Debit cards (Switch/Maestro/Solo) = 16.25p per donation (was 22p)
•    Visa Delta/Visa Electron = 23p per donation (was 22p)
•    Business debit cards (new card rate) = 30p

The credit card fee has gone up ever so slightly, but the Maestro rate is considerably less than it used to be.

We’ve analysed the last 3 months’ donations on the site and Maestro cards accounted for around a quarter of all donations - so the card fees charged to charities will, on the whole, be about the same.

What happens next?

We've only this week decided to switch back and confirmed it with the two services. The new card fees will take effect from today, Friday 5th September.

We’ll be monitoring the performance of both BMS and RBS to make sure we choose the one that will allow us to offer the best possible service to charities.

More improvements to Justgiving's infrastructure

**Update 1st September**

Due to a technical delay, the planned update to servers did not go ahead last Friday and will instead take place between the hours of midnight Friday 5th September and 8.00 am on Saturday 6th September.

**Update 1st September**

Over the weekend of the 30th August, we'll be making the latest in a long line of improvements to the multi-million pound infrastructure and systems that serve the Justgiving website. We're upgrading to brand new, state-of-the-art servers (the seriously powerful computers that run the website) and moving to a new hosting environment, Qube (the people who host and services those computers).

When is it taking place?

In order to make the move, the Justgiving site will be unavailable between the hours of midnight Friday 29th August, and 8.00 am on Saturday 30th August.

This is just like our normal scheduled maintenance periods where anyone visiting the site will be shown a holding page and will be unable to create a fundraising page or make a donation.

What does this mean?

It should make the site much faster than it is now, with fundraising pages downloading much more quickly, searches taking less time and a better overall performance.

This also paves the way for us to have a dedicated server that's only used to power charity reporting (to go with the recent changes that made reporting faster and minimised its effect on the rest of the website). So when you create and download a huge report in the future, it won't affect the site.

Think of it in terms of the website being like the old DeLorean (of Back to the future fame) at the moment, and the improvements making it like the rumoured new DeLorean, complete with a spare 'flux capacitor' that will kick in seamlessly if the first breaks:

 

You see, not only is the 'engine' that powers the site going to be a lot better, we'll also have a spare 'engine' that will start up in the unlikely event of the first one not working - meaning the site will be much more robust and reliable, as well as speedier.

We moved our sister site, firstgiving.com, to this new provider over a month ago, and they have experienced a great improvement in the site. We're hoping for much of the same.

The *techy* details...

Just in case any web systems or operations people are reading this, here's what our new hardware includes:

• Two new database clusters – each consisting of two Quad Core Xeon machines with 8GB apiece, full network and power redundancy and 64-bit throughout

• Two new SAN (storage area network) – providing 1.5 Terabytes of RAID storage each

• All new web servers, load balancers, firewalls, mail relays, IDS...

All impressive sounding stuff, even if I don't have a clue what most of them are. Suffice to say, running a website like ours and making it look simple on the front end is a *lot* more complicated than you might think...

So, thanks to our Operations Manager Charlie for providing the details and managing the project - see him below receiving a well deserved cake for last month's 'Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day'...

Reminder - payment reports change on 8th August

As we announced in June, payment reports will be scheduled from Friday 8th August. We will be making payments as normal on Fridays, and the summary of how much has been paid will be available in the Charity Account too.

The detailed reports will then be generated by our systems over the weekend and you'll be able to download them from Wednesday 13th August.

This will then be the case for all subsequent reports - payments as normal on a Fridays (as long as £100 has been donated that week, else we pay monthly) with a summary of how much has been paid, followed by the detailed information the following Wednesday.

You'll then be able to use our payment report reformatter to help manage the data.

Things to note

• Initially, this will only be the case for donation payment reports, not Gift Aid payments
• Old reports will still be generated "on the fly" (processed by our servers in real time)

Thanks to the transition to a new payment processing partner this week, the card fees charged will be lower for donations made from last Thursday (the time we actually moved to our processing partner).

Also, because the reports will be pre-generated and you only need to download them, you won't be seeing much of the Justgiving dog (or the data retriever) and the "dove of data"...

Justgiving's new processing partner - lower fees, better reliability and scalability

Justgiving has a new payment processing partner. From now on, all donations made through our site will be processed by RBS Lynk Inc (RBS) through their Bibit platform.

What does this mean?

Lower card charges on every donation:

•    Credit cards (Visa/Mastercard) = 1.34% (Mastercard was 1.4%)
•    Debit cards (Switch/Maestro/Solo) = 22p per donation
•    Visa Delta/Visa Electron = 22p per donation (was 23p)

These are amazingly low rates, and are due to the volume of transactions made on Justgiving. Here's what they used to be.

More reliable, more scalable and faster

We've joined one of the largest payment card processing service providers in Europe and we are one of their top clients globally, in terms of volume.

That means we're confident that they can handle the massive volumes of donations we process in the busiest times (we were processing 100 donations a minute the Friday before the last London Marathon). Already, donations are being processed over twice as fast.

Oh, and we join a little-known (just the five billion songs downloaded) online music retailer in using this service, as well as an extremely popular travel website. So it’s a very reliable platform that will scale as we continue to grow.

No more Verified by VISA (VBV) or MasterCard SecureCode (MCSC) on Justgiving for now [except for Maestro cards where it's compulsory]

We first introduced VBV and MCSC back in October 2006 as an early adopter of what was supposed to become a web standard for more secure card processing online. It turns out that it hasn't become web standard. Yet.

We found that people donating through our site were not aware of these services, sometimes even thinking they were a phishing scam, when in fact it was extra security! We put our donor/fundraiser helpdesk number (0845 021 2110) up on the pages where VBV or MCSC appeared so people could call us if they were unsure, but we had no control over the content or appearance of that page.

We monitored the number of people who started making a donation and went on to finish the process, and found it decreased when VBV and MCSC were switched on.

Taking VBV and MCSC off meant we were charged more

We switched off VBV and MCSC at the end of last year to encourage more people to finish the donation process and increase the volume of donations to charities. But this meant we were charged higher processing charges for every donation. 

We didn't pass that charge on to charities. We took the view that we didn't want to increase our fees and have less money go to them. So we took the hit. What did that mean to us?

A £350,000 loss.

So we are happy that we won't have to have them on the site for the foreseeable future (and that our Chief Financial Office can finally sleep soundly again).

Don't worry, we're still totally secure

We've been PCI compliant (Level 2) for over a year. As we said then, "we can now provide VISA-certified assurances to any enquiries about the security of our users' credit card and personal data."

We are not saying that either the VBV or MCSC schemes are in any way insecure - it is just that most people do not know what they are and are baffled when they come across them.

What's next...

We’re excited about our new partnership with RBS, and confident that charities on Justgiving will benefit a lot from this move.

It’s been an intense 6-week project for our development team, powered by a mountain of takeaway pizzas and sugary concoctions - but this is just the first step of our move to RBS and part of a massive program of investment in a new platform and product culminating in a complete overhaul of the site by the end of the year…

Payment reports to be scheduled from end of July

We’re making a new adjustment to payment reports so that they download quicker and don’t affect site performance. From the end of July, payment reports will be scheduled and available to download from the Wednesday after we make a payment.

Why are you changing this?

Every time a report was generated, data was retrieved from our database in real time, so when lots of reports were run at the same time our servers were processing huge amounts of data and our site performance was suffering.

As our CTO Dom said in April, we’re in the process of separating our reporting database from the live database so there will be one that deals solely with reporting. So, in future, reports won’t affect general site performance, but it’s a big project and will take some time.

Will we still see how much we’re being paid?

Yes, when we make the payment on a Friday, you’ll still see the summary of what you’re being paid. Depending on your charity’s bank, the money will arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the payment report data will be available on the Wednesday.

What about old payments?

You’ll still be able to see and download reports on all payments made before the end of July at any time. These reports will be generated in real time, unlike the new payment reports which will be pre-generated and ready to download.

We're used to thanking people based on payment reports..

We're aware that this change may affect some processes you have in place, so we'd like to help find out what other reports we could provide to help you more. Just click on the poll below:

Is this the last change to reporting now?

We still need to make small changes to the Gift Aid analysis and Gift Aid payment reports over the next month to take into account the changes to Gift Aid and the payment of transitional relief. You can read more about those changes in this riveting blog post (which is strangely the most popular post we’ve ever done…).

Update to donation exit screen

I was just making a donation to a fundraising page (nothing to do with me being part of a team that won a certain food competition) and I realised we hadn't announced the little tweaks we recently made to the donation exit screen:

Firstly, we've made it easier to print donation receipts, as many users asked us to include this feature. Of course, for those of us concerned with the environment (shouldn't that be all of us?) this information is also sent by email.

We've also made it easier to spread the word about a fundraising page - on the right you can now promote the page by email, with our hugely popular Facebook application (83,225 installs at the latest count), or with our funky widgets - we're always trying to make it as easy as possible for donors to spread the word about fundraising pages.

Here's the widget for the page, just in case you've forgotten what they are:

Finally, there's a call to action at the bottom for sponsors to create fundraising pages themselves. Of course, it's a bit of a leap from making a donation to starting to fundraise, but that's one thing we are continually trying to find out more about and research.

Payment report reformatter

Last week, we mentioned commissioning an external Excel developer to replicate the column selection and renaming features we no longer support in the Charity Account.

We're pleased to say that our payment report manager is now fully tested and ready for you to use. It’ll help you rename and select the columns you need from the new-style payment reports.

Here's what Maria from Connect - the communication disability network, www.ukconnect.org, had to say:

The charity report manager tool is great. You can simply select the different columns you would like to appear in your own unique report, and then it will automatically add all the donations for you!

It’s fast and easy to use. Thanks Justgiving for making the process easier.

And here’s how to use it:

1) Download or watch our PowerPoint presentation for an easy step-by-step guide to using the files in Excel 2003:

Download justgiving_payment_report_manager_instructions.ppt

| View | Upload your own

2) As per the instructions, check your macro security setting is at 'medium' and download either the Gift Aid payment report manager file or donation payment report manager file, depending on the type of report you’re working on:

Download Justgiving donation payment report manager 2009

Download Justgiving Gift Aid payment report manager 2009

3) Once you’ve downloaded the file and followed our instructions, open a payment report and you'll see a new menu item appears called 'Justgiving' and if you click there, you get an option called 'Format Report':

When you click on that item, the macro in the report manager will reformat your report to include only the columns and new headings you need!

And you'll also get a small calculation in the bottom left-hand corner, showing the total paid to your charity:

For donation payments:

 
For Gift Aid payments:

As this is a file to help you once our data is with you, we might not be able to give you much support once you have downloaded the report manager (the success of it depends a lot on what version of Excel you use and how your machine is set up) so it's important to follow the instructions exactly and bear in mind that:

• you must have the report formatter open before opening the file you've downloaded/saved
• if you change your macro settings, you'll need to close and re-open the file and enable macros
• you’ll need to save a different version of the report manager for different settings
• the donation payment report manager will only work with donation payment reports
• the Gift Aid payment report manager will only work with Gift Aid payment reports
• once you’ve formatted a report,  you won't be able to format it again or undo the formatting

...so always save your file first before formatting!

We’ve tested this in Excel 2003 and 2007 and in Mac Office 2004 - it works in all of them, but for each different version you’ll have to access macro settings and new menu items in a different way. The MS website has great online help resources for all versions of Excel.

If you do have any major issues or feedback, please email charities@justgiving.com.

Lastly, we send some big kudos to Tim from fruitful training, because he built the very easy-to-use Excel file for us, and recently trained a lot of us at Justgiving in how to be much better on Excel - we can't recommend him enough!

New homepage (again)

Since it's been ages (um, January?) since we last updated our homepage, we've updated it up again to make it look all pretty and easier to use.

Check it out now at www.justgiving.com!

Alternatively you can see the tiny screenshot version below:

I was going to write a bit about why our (talented and handsome) designers Will and Kai had changed the site, but our (equally talented and, er, handsome) Content Editor Sophie has already done that on our main blog.

Read more over there!

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.