Justgiving's blog

A Lesson in Blog Fundraising

I started my blog, Take Off Your Running Shoes, as a fundraising exercise. The idea is that I want to raise £100,000 for cancer research, but I really, really do not want to have to run a marathon in order to contribute…partly because I am pretty washed out by the run of non-stop cancer treatment I’ve been taking since June 2004.

As the blog started to pick up readers I came up with a formula. I said that if everybody who reads my blog contributes one pound a week for one year, then I’d reach my target really quickly. The total is running at about £32,000 currently. Mostly, I’ve been incredibly impressed at just how generous complete strangers are; people I’ve only met across the internet have been ready to contribute hundreds of pounds. It’s also a symptom of how much cancer there is around these days – we are living in the cancer age, and everybody knows somebody.

Some friends I’ve spoken to who have run marathons for breast cancer organisations and raised thousands of pounds told me that when they tried to find out where exactly their £7000 or £10,000 or whatever would be going, they were not given exact answers by the charities. I felt it was really important, for me and for my givers, that I know exactly where my hundred thousand pounds will be spent. I got a “shopping list” from Gordon Rustin, founder of the CTRT (where my money is going) - £38,000 for a research nurse, that sort of thing. I think that is another reason readers responded to my appeal – there’s no sense of this money being spent on PR or anything not directly medical.

Every time donations slow down – a bit like when you lose readers on your blog – I start to panic and try and think of new ways to stimulate traffic to my Justgiving page. Every time, we hit another round figure – 20,000, 30,000 and so on – I’m celebrating.

Dinablog: http://takeoffyourrunningshoes.typepad.com

Dina Rabinovitch is a writer and journalist (read her Guardian column here) and her book 'Take Off Your Party Dress' is available to order here.

We're Still Hiring

Over in the about us section we have just released a potentially fantastic new opportunity for one of you guys. We're looking for a brand new Accounts Administration Assistant.  

Finance are expanding, and we don’t mean from too many pork pies. Finance Manager – Operations, Jan has had this to say about the recent opening at Justgiving, “We're looking for someone to support the accounts team in carrying out their various tasks, helping ensure the accounts are completed on a timely basis.”

So if you think you have what it takes, drop him an email at the usual address. There’re also two other positions (for an application developer and a user interface developer) which are currently open if you take a look at the “Work for us” page. We've also got some info on what it's like to work at Justgiving there too, if you're curious.

Girls Win at Everything

Ah Facebook. Preferred destination of discerning timewasters everywhere.

Not sure what Facebook is? Read this.

So a short while ago, two students at Warwick Uni who clearly didn't have enough work to do, decided to start a race. The oldest competition of all. A competition of gender. Girls vs. boys. Oh yes.

The idea was to get as many similar facebookers to join each group until one of them reached 50,000 members. On Facebook, users can create and join groups for just about any topic they can think of.

The girls creamed the boys within four days. So they extended it to 100,000 members. Within 2 days the girls collectively smashed that target too, before most of the boys realised what had hit them.

This led Frances, co-founder and chief of the girls group, to realise the potential of 170,000 captivated individuals to raise money for charity.

So a new race was created. A race for philanthropic bragging rights.

Two Justgiving pages: a boys one and a girls one.

Guess what happened?

Yup, the girls ably proved their fundraising nous and crushed the boys once more.

They've raised an impressive £2,004 for from hundreds of donations while the boys are limping along in second place with £999.

However, Mark Corbett, the latest donor to the boys page seems to have found the reason:

'This isn't fair. I'd say 30% of the girls are probably using their boyfriend's credit cards anyway'.

Anyway, joking aside, this is a great demonstration of the power of social networking to make a difference in an amazingly quick and fun way. Well done Facebook crew.

Come on boys! Hide those credit cards and we can win this! If you've got a facebook account then get involved here. If you don't have a facebook account, then don't get one; the rest of the day will be a complete write-off.

Celebrity Catchup

Lots of celebs took part in last weekend's Flora London Marathon, and here are some links to their fundraising pages.

Gordon Ramsay ran with his wife Tana, for Women's Aid. He probably swore alot.

Evan Davis, BBC journalist and presenter of Dragon's Den, ran for the Anthony Nolan trust and has raised over £10,000 - helped in part by the dragons themselves. See if you can spot them in his donations table; still no messing with Duncan it seems.

Nell McAndrew ran with her mum Nancy for Cancer Research UK.

Various ex-Big Brother contestants tooks part. They managed to avoid repeating last year's BB folly. Moving swiftly on...

Michelle who won last year's Apprentice series (because we all want to work for Amstrad really) ran for the NSPCC,  no sign of the Badger though.

Ronan Keating didn't get to run in the end, but he did get to wave a big flag instead and he's raised nearly £10,000 for Cancer Research UK.

Floella Benjamin, who literally taught me how to count on Play School, was running her ninth London Marathon for Barnardo's. She's well on her way to hitting her £9,000 target.

Other than the celebs there were loads of great costumes and concepts this year, our favourites include Lloyd Scott's Indiana Jones, the legend that is Karaoke Phil, the Shelter convicts and Bernie who ran seven marathons in seven days, the FLM being the seventh.

Roll on 2008!

The BBC Effect

Top of our movers and shakers list today is Angus.

Angus is a cameraman who nearly lost his legs while filming a documentary about seven months ago. He completed yesterday's Flora London Marathon on crutches, an awesome achievement.

In the BBC pre-race pre-amble, he made a public appeal to viewers for sponsorship, during his interview with Jonathan Edwards. At the time he'd just hit the £8,000 mark and had a £10,000 target.

Consequently he had 200 donations between 9am and 11am, with 333 in total over the course of the day at a whopping total of £3725.20. It's amazing how the viewing public can respond so quickly, go and check out his page to read all the lovely comments people have left for him.

Good Luck Everyone!

It's been great to meet so many of you over the last few days. All the hard work has been done now, so all that's left for us to say is best of luck!

We have a winner

Today brings us exciting news from the Chilli Board of the ESit website.

To advertise their thankQ software, they gave away packs of chilli seeds at various conferences and asked people to send in pictures of the chilli plants grown from them.

This was one challenge our green fingered New Business Manager, Molly Loyd, couldn't resist: the seeds got sowing and the plant got growing.

And my, how it grew, until today we hear she's the winner, with a prize of the 'HOT Book of Chillies' by David Floyd! This will go down very well with Tom and I, being big fans of stupidly hot sauces.

Now before, she has to make herself "available for publicity purposes" and the inevitable interview in Heat, I managed to catch up with Molly to grab a few words:

So, Mol, how does it feel?

I'm ecstatic, really fired up: I've never won anything before in my life.

What do you put your success down to, and what's next for you?

Well, there was some hot competition, but I relied on my family's rich horticultural history to give me the strength to suc-seed [Ed, sort it out].

I now hope to use my chillies to get a wild card entry into the next International Chili Society cookoff and be a World Chili Champion.

So, well done Molly, we hope you make it and do us proud!

FLM Expo Kickoff

Well it's all kicking off. We've met some friends, people are coming over and saying nice things. Don't forget to pop down to stand 316 to check your page and say hi.

I'll post some photos once the connection stops being rubbish.

Panic!

Argh, it's the marathon this weekend!

If you're still a way away from hitting that elusive target then now is definitely time to check out our fundraising Clinic, as well as our Official London Marathon Fundraising Tips.

Marathon Stories #3

WellChild are this year's official charity for the Flora London Marathon. They're not taking it lightly either, and have their very own shiny microsite just for their supporters.

They've also got some pretty inspirational runners. Peter is running since his son James was born prematurely at 31 weeks and was rushed into intensive care where he stayed for 8 weeks. James spent the first six months of his life linked up to an oxygen machine at home.

Chloe is supporting WellChild's research into her daughter Lucy's rare chromosome disorder in the hope that other families will get the answers doctors haven't yet been able to give her.

Christine and David are running because their daugter Hannah overcame a potentially fatal illness that was luckily diagnosed early enough.

There are many other amazing WellChild supporters running this year so have a look at the Team WellChild blog to learn more. Good luck next weekend guys.

She met us at the Emirates

Our helpdesk hero Jules and myself were lucky enough to go to the Emirates Stadium on Saturday to watch the Arsenal v West Ham United match thanks to our telecomms people, Spitfire.

We were met by the lovely Jane Layzell, who gave us the magic swipey card thingys that count as tickets these days.

Here's Jules enjoying the view:

Having a half-time chicken balti pie with beans was a tasty, if expensive, treat - but apparently the normal fans don't get beans so we felt sufficiently spoilt. Still, Jules needed the pick-up at half time as he's a massive fan of the Gunners.

So whilst he was cursing the Superhuman effort of Robert Green at full time, I was busy earning my "spotter's badge" by pointing out Melanie Slade at the press entrance.

Best known for being Theo Walcott's other half, she also supported Cancer Research UK's Race for Life last year. Alas, I couldn't find any Race for Life fundrasing pages by her - maybe next year?

Marathon Stories #2

FARM-Africa have got their biggest ever London Marathon team this year. They're all brilliant in their own way but there's one who's extra special: Jo Swainson.

She just finished the Marathon des Sables the other week (150+ miles across the Sahara desert carrying all your own supplies) and is now gearing up for the London Marathon, all at the tender age of 23!

Check out her site and fundraising page, she's well on her way to raising £10,000 for FARM-Africa.

In other news we just got our lovely shirts for the Marathon Expo in a few weeks. Not that we're excited or anything.

Marathon Stories #1

Less than three weeks to go folks, so it's time to feature some of the 13,000+ London Marathon runners raising funds through Justgiving.

First up is Peter Ketley, who is raising money for the Red Cross. Peter is a Falklands veteran and was helped by the charity along with his comrades 25 years ago.

He's currently top fundraiser for the British Red Cross Marathon team with nearly £7000 in the bank. Impressive work sir.

Justgiving in Korea

My parents have been on holiday the past few weeks, having just arrived in South Korea from Japan, they found something which they wanted to share with us all. 

During this time, I’ve convinced them to use Flickr.com and upload things from their travels. They’re not too keen on some people they’ve never met seeing some of the pictures with themselves on, so they’ve been very clever and made them private. It’s something that lots of us are concerned with when we’re on the net… but thanks to the privacy settings on all these online sites you really can be as anonymous as you like. Like a ninja. On the other side they have some fantastic things they have to share… like awesome food and beautiful landscapes from Kyoto to Seoul.

Having spoken to me during this week via MSN very early or late at night, I told them about how I’d been working on a website for the Chelsea pensioners, their site has been starting up a “Buy a Brick campaign”. They then uploaded something I think is a wonderfully similar campaign from just outside of Busan, a city in Korea. The Beomeosa temple which needed help to be restored to its former glory, has tiles which people could leave their personal message on a fter giving their contribution.

   

My parents paid 10,000 won (the equivalent of £5.00) and signed the tile as you can see in the picture.  It just goes to show, that whilst we see all these things going on around us in our own lives… there are other things out there in the world with causes just as similar to our own.