Justgiving's blog

Justgrievesy.com

  It's only bloomin' Friday and at JG towers with a tearful snuffle, we will soon be losing a talisman that has kept this machine well oiled.  Our little Greivsy with his fantastic wit and charm (steady now girls…) will be missed, but never the less he’ll be seeing us regularly of that I have no doubt.  All of us want to wish him a very well time in the world of show biz and let him know just how much he means to us.

   

In other news… we’ve had a very busy week and also are planning towards are part in the Flora London Marathon Expo which will be held at the fabulous Excel Centre (in the Dockyards) at London.  To add to this, we’ve set up a Justgiving Facebook group for the event!  There, you can upload your pictures from the event, talk to other members about it, post your Justgiving page to us and much more.  So why not have a look at the site and give it a go!  Inside of Justgiving, there has been much talk about what we’ll be wearing for th e duration of the event and sadly the waist coats I envisaged everyone wearing are off the list. 

Just to add to my woe, in an episode of Ugly Betty the brilliant colours of JG were in action in the precise way I imagined. So despite the face we’re missing out on a fashion catwalk style it won’t hold us back from blogging about the event and getting some of you lovely people on video for our Youtube site.  Have a great weekend!     

The Guinness Pint Training

Ever wondered what a pint of Guinness looks like in training?

Wonder no longer:

Thanks to Antonio for sending this in!

Nearly five and a half years ago...

Nearly five and a half years ago someone failed to show for an interview at JG towers. After a phone call that woke him up, and a very quick-thinking excuse about problems on the train, James Grieve turned up looking a little bedraggled and charmed Anne-Marie and Caroline into offering him a six-month position covering Caroline’s maternity leave.

Fast forward to March 2007 and James and Caroline are both still here – having job-shared, worked part-time, full-time and not at all at various times in the intervening years. Zarine’s neverending patience paid off as James has done some amazing stuff since joining JG – copywriting, marketing, creative stuff, building the blog, helpdesk, sales and more.

He’s also pursued his ‘other’ career of being a theatre director, spending summers soaking up the wind and rain at the Edinburgh festival, and Caroline had the opportunity to spend valuable time with her family.

But today is potentially the last day of a great collaboration as James prepares to head to the National Theatre at Easter and Caroline gets ready to leave London in the summer. Unless James comes back – again - before July, it’s the end of an era for two of our oldest JGers. Here’s to job-sharing – and a great reason why you shouldn’t turn down the offer of six months work…

Sort my Blogroll

Spring is sprung, so it's time for a clear-out of our blogroll.

I'd like it to become a very, very long and distinguished list of fundraiser blogs, so please either comment this post with your blog url or email me and I'll get your blog listed. You'll get listed much quicker if you're hosting one of our widgets too.

Happy Birthday Liz!

You might be getting bored of it, but here is something we're certainly not bored of. Cake!

Friday was Liz Smith's birthday and seeing as we starting working at Justgiving together at the same time I thought I would do something nice and wish her a happy birthday with the rest of the team. I even recorded a video of the event for her too, and took  photos just to show you all a bit of the action from inside JG towers.   

Jase was kind enough to demonstrate how cake should be consumed:

JG:Clinic part 9 - Tell All Your Friends to Tell All Their Friends

We're loving the way that widgets are being adopted. The days of depending on email to make the ask are clearly numbered. The best part is, widgets can help to inform people you don't necessarily know that well. You can ask your friends to host a widget for you or forward on an email to other groups who might be interested.

Andrew and Natalya's website has been cropping up regularly. They're encouraging all of their fellow bloggers to host their JG Widget and even mirror the required code on their own site:

I asked Natalya how it's been going. Here's what she said:

'At the moment we have around 30-40 blogs and websites that show the widget for us. It's encouraged a lot of people to view our site and the Justgiving page which is excellent'.

So that means they're getting bonus clickthroughs from here, here, over there, somewhere else, other places and lots more besides. Brilliant work.

You don't have to blog though, you can just ask directly on your page, like Yvonne has for her London Marathon page:

It all works, and it all drives extra traffic to your fundraising page. This ultimately results in more donations, so give it a go!

Foluke's RFL Update

Fearless tester Foluke has hit £300 on her Race For Life page.

Check out this morning's video update.

The All New Adventures of Us

Our new 'About Us' section has just gone live. It's much better than the old one and has pictures of everyone, lots more about what makes us tick and reasons why you should have sent us your CV already.

Well done Kai for making it look so lovely.

New stars...

Hey if you've been on the Justgiving homepage recently you might've noticed that we've got four new smiley faces in our fundraisers gallery.

FIrst there's Tali and Em, collectively known as the "Guatemala Girls", who are taking their fundraising to Tibet. Good luck ladies!

Next, we've got our second footie-mad cyclist- you may remember Keith the chef, who cycled to 20 football grounds in 12 days- well, the gauntlet was thrown down and the challenge has now been taken up by Jamie Penfold, who is cycling to all English premiership grounds starting this Saturday. Oh, and if you sponsor Jamie, you could win a signed English team away top, some English team memorabilia or a Sky Sports goodie bag.

Finally there's Angus Macfadyen, who is running the London Marathon - on crutches. I cannot begin to imagine what a challenge he's got ahead of him. However, it sounds like he's up to the task as he's already clocked 440 miles on his crutches, using his good leg. What a trouper!

Good luck to all our new fundraising superstars!!!

Oh, and if you'd like to join our gallery of stars yourself, here's how...

JG:Clinic part 8 - Badge Your Email Signature

Ever since we launched the widget at the end of last year, lots of you have been asking for something to put in your email signature. Widgets work on websites, but not in email signatures. However the Badge on the other hand does work as an email signature in Outlook.

I've made a short video to show how it's done:

A couple of points:

- If your work email has got super-draconian security settings (ie. you're not allowed to change your own signature and it's managed by some chap in the IT dept), then you might not have access to do this.

- The same goes if you're on a networked system like Citrix.

- Webmail. Now I know some webmail services do support HTML signatures, so why not have a play around with the code. If you get it working in Hotmail, Gmail, AOL or any of the others then let me know and we can share the knowledge with everyone else.

Have fun!

Guest Blogger: Mark's Tip

I recently committed to take part next winter in what will be my fifth Ski Challenge for Scope. Here's my page.

I've been very successful over the years in raising funds for Scope across my various Justgiving pages. I hope very much that my momentum following my return from 'Colorado 2007' will keep going; I've already received £1,015 in donations!

Donor Fatigue

I'm very conscious, as I was last year, that I'm continuing to 'hit' the same people, year-on-year, to sponsor me. Thankfully, most are really happy to be supporting Scope, but what keeps my sponsors coming back is my self-fund principle. I pay for my trips myself and do not use any percentage of the money raised to subsidise my participation costs.

When there's a travel element to the event, it's really important to state this on your page directly. This is how I did it:

Don't forget that it's worth talking to your charity about payments in kind too. Policies may vary but sorting out the flights yourself can be accepted as part of the fundraising target. I've had flights donated to me in past that can count towards cost-offsetting; it may mean I'm not on the same plane as the rest of the group but it really makes fundraising a bit easier.

Best Wishes,

Mark

Got your own tips you'd like to share, or maybe you'd like to be a guest blogger too? Email me now!

Digg & Del.icio.us

If you scroll to the bottom of a fundraising page then underneath the totals, you'll see two new links next to the old RSS links, a bit like this:

If you know what Digg and del.icio.us are, then they should be fairly self explanatory.

If not, then read on.

What's Digg?

Digg is a great way to promote the news that's important to you. Here's an explanation from their site:

"...everything on Digg is submitted by our community (that would be you). After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see."

Digg is a great way of generating some free extra traffic to your fundraising page, especially if you have a particularly good story. We've seen some great examples in the past of Justgiving pages being Dugg, and so this link makes it lots easier to start a new Digg.

Check out what we've been digging. Digg is very tech-news heavy in general, but many special interest stories (like Global Rich List) break through to the front page, so have a play around with it.
 

And what's Del.icio.us?

You know when you bookmark stuff using your browser, those bookmarks are only available on that particular computer, running that browser?

Well del.icio.us lets you bookmark online, so all your sites are collected together under one account. You can also tag and describe your bookmarks so you remember what they are. Better still, since it's all networked, you can see if other people have been bookmarking the same sites as you and then check out other similar and popular sites you might not have heard of.

If you want to bookmark your page quickly, then click this link, and you can do the same for other fundraising pages you think are cool.

Here's a list of stuff tagged 'Justgiving' for example. We hope you find these new features useful and they help you get your page further into the wild.

Monday Service Update

I'll leave this one to Sys Dev lead developer Jason:

Thanks to everyone involved with getting the website back. All sponsorship donation processes are up and over 90% of standard donation and custom implementations.

Not only do we get together when things are going well, but more importantly, the way we come together in the bad times, not as finance, customer service, tech, charities of supporters, but as one team, to ensure our customers and clients have the best service.

Well said Jason.

Service Update

Our processing partner Barclaycard has been having some pretty serious problems since yesterday afternoon. As a result, we've not been able to accept donations since 3pm GMT on 15/03/07.

Consequently, just before 11am GMT today we rolled back payment processing to our backup system, and donations can now be accepted on fundraising pages as before.

We're really sorry that this has happened; Justgiving was founded on the promise of making fundraising easier and we know that's not been your experience of our service since yesterday afternoon.

Barclaycard are working urgently to resolve the problem. If you've emailed people in the last 24 hours asking them to sponsor you, they can now re-visit your page and make their donation.

Happy birthday to Kai!

Ok so it's been a bit bonkers around here recently. But there is always time for cake! Here's Kai in the throes of cake-ly anticipation....he's officially entered his 'mid twenties' now!

JG:Clinic part 7 - Using the Social Web

So you already have a Justgiving page. That's a great start but there are lots of other websites that can help your fundraising further. The best thing about the new social web is that all the individual services can work together to help you. Take a look at this lovely diagram:

A Justgiving page can be a starting point for an entire education about your fundraising. In the personal message section you can hyperlink to everything if you want to: your blog, flickr account, YouTube videos and everything else inbetween. The best part is, you can track the activity on all of these by subscribing to all the various RSS feeds.

The easiest way of doing this in our opinion is to set your browser homepage to Netvibes, Pageflakes or Google Personalised. My current favourite is Netvibes. Here's a shot of a demo page I built:

Click to go large

Clockwise from top right: Our MySpace comments, our blog, the FG blog, Justgiving tags on del.icio.us, our flickr stream and finally three fundraising pages that I'm keeping an eye on.

The beauty of RSS is being able to pull in all the content I want and put it where I want it, without having to visit all of the sites individually. It's easy to set up and much more convenient.

So are Justgiving users doing this? Yes. Have a look at Jeremy's blog. He has got everything and his fundraising page and blog work together seamlessly to keep all of his readers and sponsors up to date with his challenge. Follow his example and you'll spend less time chasing up your data, and your sponsors will feel more connected to your event.

Let me know if you're using other websites to promote your Justgiving page.

Justgiving 2.0

We're not going into too much detail for now, but here's two new features which are launching very soon:

Tags! That's not all:

Not actual size!

That's right, Digg and Del.icio.us links on fundraising pages! If that means nothing, don't worry, we'll explain everything soon enough when these two new features have been launched, and what they mean for you.

JG:Clinic part 6 - Ruling URLs

One of the reasons I haven't jumped feet-first onto the Facebook bandwagon is that they haven't sorted out a decent short URL structure like MySpace, del.icio.us, flickr or we have.

Here's a link to Kai's Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/p/Kai_Chan_Vong/506185987

Catchy!

I can almost picture him out and about, shouting 'FORWARD SLASH, LITTLE P, FORWARD SLASH, KAI UNDERSCORE CHAN UNDERSCORE VONG, FORWARD SLASH LOTS OF MEANINGLESS NUMBERS' to get people to visit.

Although Facebook mostly grows via hyperlinking and email, there's always an advantage to having a memorable short URL. Bands often announce their MySpace URLs onstage. People swap them in pubs and clubs instead of phone numbers. It's becoming a commodity and with the onset of initiatives such as OpenID, the URL will get more and more relevant.

So bearing that in mind, do give plenty of thought to your Justgiving URL. Availability means you won't always be able to just have your name (eg. www.justgiving.com/simon went in 2003!). So think of some memorable examples that will help your sponsors remember where your page is. Make them as intriguing as possible and you're going to multiply your clickthrough rate, which ultimately helps your fundraising total. Here are some good ones:

/cycle2012 - Cycling, Olympic year, not what you'd expect

/mymomentofmadness -  I wonder what it was...

/NoelEdmondsIsInnocent - No deal.

/Stelios40th - No, I wasn't invited either.

/reformedfatkid - Go former fat kid, go!

/mattinmanure - Ewww...

/dysfunctionals - They'll make it!

So keep it short and memorable. Avoid really long URLs incase people type it in wrong (and it doesn't fit on your cards), also avoid underscores and hyphens because they can cause confusion too.

New Start

It's all go at The Towers this morning. We've got three new JG'ers joining us.

Maya is one of our new charity account managers. She's got loads of account management experience in many scenarios and is a great addition to the ever-growing charities team.

Jan (pron. Yan) is joining today as our new Operations Finance Manager. He will be managing Tim, which is a big relief for Neil and Ben.

Sabitha is joining the Product Development team this morning as a Tester. She's previously been contracting at various big financial institutions where she got really, really good at QA. She'll help us release new things that work properly.

Friday Guilt from Fit People

Fit people. Absurdly fit people.

Sometimes we see fundraising pages that make us feel very lazy and inadequate. James found Dan and Rob's page this morning, and it's making us feel a bit lardy.

There seems to be alot of one-upmanship going on with these ultra-uber-megathon challenges. Dan and Rob are doing their very own Triathlon to the Rugby World Cup this summer. This is following on from Dan's dad, John's World Cup Challenge last year, which earned him fundraiser of the month at the time. It ain't no normal triathlon, here's what they're doing:

- A cross-channel swim (that's 24 miles)

- A 1120 mile cycle ride (160 miles for 7 days)

- A 262 mile run (a marathon a day for 10 days)

This is called a Deca-Ironman apparently. So with the power of ten ironmans, we wish them the best of luck and hope they're still capable of watching some rugby at the end of it all. Check their website for more details.

JG:Clinic part 5 - Why am I doing this again?

This fits in with what I wrote earlier about customising your personal message. It's also something really simple to do, that loads of marathon runners (and other fundraisers for that matter) forget about completely.

Why am I doing this?

A common error when asking for sponsorship is to make no mention of the story behind the challenge itself. It's OK to say 'I'm running the marathon, it's a long way, please sponsor me'. Thousands of people say that every year. Funnily enough, everyone already knows it's a long way, and that it's no walk in the park.

Effective fundraising pages communicate very clearly the core reason behind why that person is undertaking this particular challenge. Let's have a look at a really good one:

Sarah's page is great. Not only does she give the personal background into why she's doing it ('the marathon seed was well and truly planted in my mind last year when some colleagues ran it. Plus, I spend half my life in the gym, so I figured I may as well have a goal and do it for a good cause'), but she's gone into detail about how her charity will benefit:

'The difference this fund raising can make is phenomenal, given the size of the charity (£50k cost turnover p.a.) and the related positive affects of successful counselling.'

Donors love knowing that their money makes a tangible difference to a charity and not that it's just disappearing into some massive pot somewhere. Sarah's communicated this really well, so it's no surprise she's already exceeded her target by over £500 with more than a month to go before the big day.

She's also asked for some inspiration: 'I'd love it if you could give me names of tunes to load on to my iPod'.

So in the comments section her donors are gradually building up her marathon playlist. Take a look:



So has anyone else found a great way of involving their sponsors? Let me know.

Liam's Update

We've just received some worrying news about Liam Fairhurst, who was last seen on our blog winning money for charity from ITV show Million Pound Giveaway, at the tender age of 11.

Liam's cancer has returned to his lungs and he's just gone back into hospital. The good news is that it's operable and he's going to restart chemotherapy.

Liam has decided that he wants to go all the way and raise £100,000 for CLIC Sargent. He's already raised an amazing £70k, so there's not far to go. Help him out!

JG:Clinic part 4 - Print it out!

A couple of years ago James and I were at the London Marathon Expo, eating too many sweets. A very excited chap called Alan bounded over to show us his business cards. Sadly we don't have a photo, and I think it succumbed to the Great Flood of 2006, but he'd made a card with his Justgiving url on it.

'I don't have everyone's email address' he said.
'Wow, that's awesome' said James and I in unison.

Well as part of the Clinic, I'd like to expand on this idea a little.

Cards are great for lots of reasons:

• they fit in your wallet
• they're not sponsorship forms, so no hassle
• you can make them look nice
• you'll get sponsorship from people in the pub whose email address you don't have
• they're still not sponsorship forms

So where to get them done? Well the cheap option is to make them yourself, print them out, chop them up and get busy dishing them out.

The slightly less cheap, but more exciting option is to go and check out our friends at moo.com

All you need is a flickr photo account and a spare tenner, and they'll print 100 individually customised cards for you and deliver them in double-quick time. If you don't have a flickr account they've still got some great galleries to choose from.

Here's some moo cards:

Aren't they pretty? Check out this Canadian blogger who is doing this right now.

Give it a go, print them out and let us know if it makes a difference. We owe it to Alan.

You what? Youtube!

Today we bring you a double bonus post in the form of a video blog for you to indulge yourselves with. It features our very own Foluke running in the Cancer Research UK race for life.. which we thought we'd put up here on the blog from our shiny new Youtube site! 

For those of you who don't know about Youtube, its a tube for all of you!  And If that didn't quite clear the whole thing up, then take a little gander at what the nice people at BBC wrote about it all.  The article features a chap called Peter aka Geriatric1927 to his friends on Youtube. If you didn't guess from his name, he is 79 years old and video blogging about his life to the world and making friends from this kind of medium.  Clever stuff huh!   

So why have we been going on about animated gifs and now Youtube videos?  Well quite simply because we really believe this is the future for getting accross your message wherever you are in the world.  A great example of a Youtube video spreading a good message can be seen in the Sarah McLachlan song below.  A great song and an even more important twist in it all, that really puts things in perspective.

So that's it, you heard it first here on the blog about how we've now launched our very own youtube page which we hope to customise and play with over the next few weeks... so why not subscribe to us to keep up to date with our video antics and even put up your own videos using great free software such as videomach and if you do... please tell us about them! Until the next update have a great weekend. 

JG:Clinic part 3 - Emailing People

A short but important one today. If you've just built a fundraising page recently, or if you've got one without any cash on it yet then this could help.

Don't email everyone at the same time

Why not?

Well, let's say you've got 100 contacts you plan to email your fundraising page to. Within that potential donor pool, you'll have maybe five or more different types of person: close family, extended family, some colleagues, a few old school friends and your best mates for example.

You can't treat all of these people the same in your emails. Close family and friends (ie, your mum, dad, husband, wife and pet rabbit) should always be the first port of call. They need to get the page started with a bang.

Here's a grab from Dan and Andrew's Golfing Challenge page (click if it's too small):

Well done Mum and Dad. Once they've done their bit and put some decent money onto the page then you're free to craft your communications to the 'maybe' crowd. Due to the law of averages, your sponsors will look at the amounts others have donated and probably go for a similar figure.

Without that more personalised approach at the start, you could be stuck with a page that has a lower average donation. Just a thought.