The Justgiving charities blog

How to badge your email signature

Today we received an email from Laura at Sue Ryder Care that included one of the pretty little buttons we make available in the charity account.

What buttons you say? The ones you get by following these instructions...

Ones like this little chap here:

Or on Laura's email signature like this:

That button, when clicked on, takes you to their fundraising area on Justgiving. And it's a great way to promote the site - even if people don't click on it, they'll still read it and potentially remember it...

Find out how to do it yourself by watching the short video tutorial below:

Click here to watch the video in full screen

Now on my email signature, I have a very snazzy headline animator (courtesy of Feedburner) that shows the latest posts from this very blog:

And what's cool about that is that I can get stats for it (I love stats) - and since our helpdesk have this in their signature too, a lot of eyes get to see it - 1,386 people in the last 30 days in fact.

So, whilst not many people may have clicked on the animator, a hell of a lot have seen it - and it's funny what things sometimes stick in people's minds...

Who knows, it might even be why you're reading this!

And for an old post on another great email signature, click here. And you can find out how to add a fundraising page badge to your signature here.

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...

New Columns on Payment reports! Wow!

Now, I've announced some exciting new features in my time, but this is possibly the best - yes, we have added two new columns for you to select when downloading payment reports. And what snappy column titles they are:

So there you have it, Estimated VAT and Net Donation Minus Estimated VAT. A real cool addition to the column selections.

But seriously, this is an important update, one that many of you asked for. Why? Well, it's all to do with the way we transfer money to you.

As you know, we charge a 5% transaction fee on every donation and VAT is applicable on that amount. But we only calculate the VAT for the total fees for each payment we make to you, not on each individual donation.

In the Finance Reports section of the Charity Account, you can see a high level breakdown of the Gross and Net payments as below (with amounts erased, obviously):

You can download a PDF giving you a one page invoice detailing the total amounts and deductions when you click on view details but you can now see that breakdown in the detailed reports for each payment too.

So if you need to attribute VAT on each donation, or record net donation without VAT (depending on your financial systems), you can easily do so once a payment report has been created.

But remember, these figures are only estimated per donation since the actual VAT is calculated on the total fees taken - dividing the total VAT to all the donations will inevitably cause some small rounding errors.

So there you are, that was me trying to make VAT exciting. Now I know how Adam Hart-Davis feels...

JG Insider: how much have you raised?

Today's lesson is a simple one - how to find out how much you have raised on Justgiving since you joined.

If you've ever wondered how many pages have been created, the total donated through the site how much Gift Aid has been reclaimed, follow these instructions...

When you log-in to the charity account at www.justgiving.com/charityaccount, you'll see the welcome screen:

If you then click on Total Raised To Date you'll see the details below, accurate to the end of the previous day:

Obviously the example used above is for our "Demo Charity" and is not the financial records of an actual charity on the site, but it does show you how easy it is to do.

Try it yourself and see how much your charity has raised online!

JG Insider: how to report on pages by creation date

Yesterday's top tip gave you instructions on how to subscribe to page creation email alerts, but if you want to report on pages created during any date range, this is how you do it:

You first need to log-in to your Charity Account, go to the Fundraising and Donations section and click on the Event Fundraising link. Once there, you should click on the Create a detailed report link as below (click to enlarge):

On the next screen, you should select the Quick Reports option and click on the orange Start Creating Report button:

You can then choose  whether you want to report on pages created, with an event date, or expiring within your required date range:

 
Once you have selected the option you require, you can type in the date range or use the calendar to select - in the example below I would create a report on pages created in the last month.

Once you click on Continue, you can then select the columns to include in your report and choose the format for the download (Excel or CSV).

As you can see, these directions can help you report on pages expiring within a desired date range, and  also on pages with a specific event date. More info on creating the event date type report can be found in the charity account help section here.

JG Insider: subscribe to email alerts

One of the most crucial aspects of fundraising on Justgiving is knowing when someone creates a fundraising page for your charity and contacting them to offer support.

Back in December, we announced an update to the site that meant charities could subscribe to two email alerts: one sent whenever someone creates a fundraising page and another for when a payment report is ready to download.

Now seems like as a good time as any to recap on this announcement, so to subscribe to one or both of these alerts, you need to log-in to your charity account at www.justgiving.com/charityaccount
and go to the Account Management tab.

On that screen, you can select the Manage your email alerts link on the left to get to the screen below so you can subscribe (click on image to enlarge):

These alerts can only be set up for the email address used to log-in, so if others need to receive these alerts, you should add a new user to your account in the same section or contact us at charities@justgiving.com

These instructions can also be found here in the charity account help section.

JG Insider: how to add an event

Today's lesson from the JG Insider is how to add an event to your fundraising area.

Every charity on Justgiving has this area, and for the Demo Charity it can be found at www.justgiving.com/jgdemo/raisemoney as below

When you click on the "Create your page" button, you are shown the list of promoted events for that charity on the following page. On the Demo Charity's page, they only have a default event listed (if you do not ask us to promote any events, our most popular events are automatically listed):

Any event can be added to this area from your Charity Account. You just need to log-in and go to the Fundraising & Donations section and click on Events Fundraising.
There you click on the "Add an event to these sites" link (click on image to enlarge):

You should then click on the orange button on the next screen

and fill in the form that then appears:

Once you have submitted your form, an email is sent to our Charity Helpdesk team (of Liz and Josie) who will add it to your fundraising area within 2-3 working days. These instructions can also be found in the Account Help section here.

Introducing the JG Insider: how to see all your fundraisers

Today marks the first in a new series of blog posts that will include hints and tips from a "JG Insider" to help you use the Charity Account and other features of the Justgiving site.

To start, we're going to look at one of the basic, but often overlooked or unknown, actions you can do on the site: see all fundraisers for your charity.

If we take Salah Rahman Sports Foundation (SRSF) as our example and go to their fundraising area, you will see a search box on the right under the sample page image:

As it says, you can search for specific names or see all the fundraisers for that charity: it's a quick and easy way of taking a high level view of your supporters' efforts on Justgiving.

No log-ins are needed, just click on the link and find out what all your fundraisers are doing.

The search results for all SRSF fundraisers can be seen here.

Why not promote this link on your website too - if you want to offer supporters a choice of who to sponsor, this is a great way to do so.

Furthermore, SRSF have done this in their email communications - the last email they sent to all their charity supporters included the link to all their fundraisers. You can read it here: Download support_salah_sports.doc

This is a great way of making a general appeal for donations specific by highlighting the efforts of their supporters and is more compelling than a simple donate link. Why not try it yourselves?

PS - in the unlikely event that you're wondering who the JG Insider is, it's me, Jonathan (Hello Mum).