Justgiving's blog

JG:Clinic part 2 - Fun with Photos

Do photos on a fundraising page make a difference?

The short answer is yes. Allow me to demonstrate:

Ben is doing the Marathon des Sables.

That's in the Sahara Desert. It's also the 'toughest footrace on earth'.

Lots of sand? Check.

Would I recognise Ben? Check.

Ironic t-shirt? Check.

10/10 there. Here's another:

Fay, Cathy and Nicola are doing the Moonwalk.

Amusing take on our cartoons? 10 bonus points.

Proficiency with Photoshop? Definitely.

Communicates the theme of the event? Check.

Are they smiley? Yup.

Here's one more good 'un:

Stephen and Duncan are cycling through Ireland.

Do they have bikes? Check.

Proper looking 'tour de france style' bikes? Oh yes.

Lycra? Plenty.

Matching polo shirts, like they're in a team? Indeed.

The point is easy. If you upload a really good photo that is easily recognisable, is relevant to your event and maybe a bit funny then it will definitely help your potential sponsors connect to you and what you're doing.

What we don't like seeing on pages so much are our stock cartoons. So if you've been putting it off, sort that photo out right now, and don't forget that you can update it as often as you like, or even make a fancy animated one.

Sir Ranulph

'ten four!'

Sir Ranulph Fiennes is about to embark on his latest mission: scaling the North Face of the Eiger and raising £1.5m for Marie Curie Cancer Care while he's at it.

There's lots of coverage in the papers about it today, I know this because I read about it over various shoulders on the bus this morning.

On his page, Sir Ranulph states "Climbing the Eiger will be truly challenging, but with every step that our three-man team takes,  I’ll know that our efforts will be making a real and tangible difference to the lives of terminally ill people and their families and carers across the UK."

Best of luck to him, find out more on his MySpace blog.

Let him eat cake

It's Tim's birthday tomorrow. Here's a picture of him eating the chocolate and cognac birthday cake we bought him. We ate the rest of it. And a sponge one too.

Tim's our charity subscriptions dude. He does a lot of number crunching. And he sings the Pogues. And he supports Tottenham Hotspur, poor boy.

He's one of the youngest people in the office. Tomorrow he turns 15.

JG: Clinic Tutorial

Just yesterday Simon was talking on the blog about a fantastic little way to really give your fundraising site a bit of oomph, an example of this is to create a small animation similar to one created by a chap called Will.

So often do we see plain fundraising sites where hardly anything is different… the image is just left default and the text is lacking anything inspirational. Be it in the form of text, images or anything else that just gives people an extra incentive to put money (that would otherwise go on a pizza down the local or an extra beer after that long day at work) to the charity you feel so strongly for.

 

Well this all has to change and I will give you a tool that will instantly make you a hit with browsers, this super special spice will give that extra nice finish to your site and all you need to do is download it and follow the steps. 1, 2, 3… and you’re done!  I've even made an animated gif you can click on to show you how it's done step by step.

First head over to this site which holds a nifty little utility called unFREEz (this software is 110% free, and will never charge you to use it… how wonderful is that?).

Double click on the file icon. Okay… so maybe that’s a few more actions than you were expecting!

Next select those images you want to have as a little animation and now drag them over to the white box inside of UnFREEz. Next, make sure you’re happy with the Frame delay (I use 100cs for mine… which is around 1 second) and just click Make Animated Gif Button, name it something.

That’s all there is to it.

You can now show all your friends and family just how clever you are and I promise not to tell anyone this little quick fire tip to make you an instant hit at parties (it really gets the girls!).  With this animated gif you can use it in y our Justgiving page, your personal blog or even in msn messenger if you’re clever enough to know how!

Drop me an email if you've created something wonderful on kai at justgiving dot com!

Badges back in fashion

The flash-enabled Widget is nearly here. But we know you can't wait for stuff, so we've imported the Justgiving Badge from our American cousins at Firstgiving.

The badge is a simple button that links to your fundraising page. It's not got as many features as the widget does, but it's still useful and more fun than hyperlinks.

You can find them in the same section as the widget, just click 'Promote this Page' on any Justgiving fundraising page and you'll find the code you need. There are three lovely designs to choose from, so here's three lovely examples:

Geek Constellation

For the last two days, I've been at the Future of Web Apps conference with Will, Adam and Dom.

It was fantastic. There are proper write-ups and photos over on Technorati, but the view from the balcony was rather sparkly:

Sweet.

JG Fundraising Clinic, part 1

The other week I wrote a rather long and wordy post that summarised our top ten fundraising tips.

It was pretty popular, so since it's full-on marathon fundraising time of year, I thought it would be useful to expand on some of the points that were made.

And so, the JG clinic is born.

Getting Personal

First things first, you have to make your page compelling. I know it's tempting to build a page, not bother to type anything in to the personal message section and forget about a photo.

The fact is, pages that aren't personalised raise much less money than their nicely decorated peers. There really is no excuse for not putting your own photo on these days, bearing in mind all the great online photo services we have access to now.

And make it a good one. An action shot maybe, at least something relevant to your event, your charity or something that your sponsors will recognise. Like Jeremy's page here, look at him go! You can even go one step further and do something like this:

That's courtesy of Will. You can make an animated gif using something like this.

Now, on to the message part. If you have a look around the site, you'll quite often come across this:

...with nothing else. Now that's what we wrote. Please edit it. If you do, you could end up with something brilliant, like this:

I nicked this from Mark's page, but notice that he's used our template and made it great. He's told us why he's running the marathon and why he's helping Save the Rhino.

Stay tuned for another JG Clinic healing session tomorrow.

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese new year to you all out there, I thought I would do a quick little post about something different outside the walls of Justgiving Towers.

Today is officially the year of the pig and it also happens to be the year in which I was born.  That’s right I’m a pig. 

Being half Chinese, I still really like to get into the whole spirit of things and celebrate this oriental festive season.  The new year for us Chinese is a time of eating nice food (sadly no sweet and sour pork), gathering with family and giving out money in red and gold envelopes (we call these Fung Baow). 

This year is no different!  Some of my vast array of family from my Chinese side are all coming to my house tonight to munch and chat about what is new in their lives.  Lots of my cousins are soon heading off to university to learn new things and quite a few of my uncles are setting up new restaurants so it is always a busy for them yet we try to get together at least once in the year.

Being as I’m posting about this, I thought it’d be a good idea to post up some pictures to show the whole pig celebration theme.  The first one is something my mom found whilst in a little Chinese supermarket, a nice little golden pig.  Second of all is an origami pig that my housemate from university made for me last year during his Prison Break origami phase. 

Well that’s all from me but for me to hope you enjoy your day and you’re all now making your way off to the little local Chinese just around the corner!  Happy Chinese New Year or.. “Kung-He Phat-Choy”.  

Noob.

Say 'yo' to Rohit.

He's a new developer on our product team who started this month, so he's in for the now-compulsory starter interview. Let's begin:

What's your favourite website?

lifehacker.com

Did you get up to anything fruity on Valentine's Day?

What is Valentine's Day? Oh dear.

What's your favourite joke?

A bear and a rabbit are both taking a ...(NSFW, sorry folks)

What was your favourite metal album of 2006?

'The Black Waltz' by Kalmah. Roar.

Which word or phrase do you completely overuse?

'Yo', obviously.

Your CV mentioned you were fluent in OOP. It sounds messy, can you elaborate?

OOP is Object Oriented Programming. Not very exciting. I'm much more interested in CSS-based web design and web 2.0 graphics, yo.

Tell us one thing about you that we'd only ever find out if we gave you one of these silly questionnaires...

When I was at a university, me and a mate once finished a whole bottle of absinthe (that's half each) within a 20 minute bus journey.

The moral of the story being: don't get on a bus in Warwick.

Welcome to the fold Ro!

A Little Downtime

Just to let everyone know:

Justgiving will be unavailable between 3.00am and 7.00am GMT on Saturday 17th February 2007 for essential maintenance.

That's Friday night so most of you won't even notice unless you have insomnia or stay out really, really late.

Thanks for your understanding.