Justgiving's blog

Above & Beyond

Every now and then we come across people who really go that extra mile. They're cropping up more and more: creative fundraisers who will not be bested by the enormity of their challenge, nor are they phased by the prospect of raising tons of cash for their chosen charity. They just get on with it.

Today's Mr Incredible is Andy Willis from Southampton. Andy decided that it would be a cracking idea to do 26 marathons over a two year period. He's already completed the London Marathon and Isle of Wight Marathon, so there's only another 24 races to go.

He plans to run at least one every month between now and his final race, the 2009 Flora London Marathon, raising a grand total of £15,000 for Help the Hospices.

Andy made the decision to do this in recognition of the care a friend's daughter is receiving from Naomi House Children's Hospice near Winchester:

“I felt that just running one race wasn’t doing enough, so I came up with the idea of a marathon of marathons. I really wanted to do something extra to help hospices and show my appreciation for the great work they do. It’s going to be tough, but I’m confident I can pull it off.”

Andy, we salute you.

F is for...

The Flora London Marathon of course. 15,000 runners had Justgiving pages this year and have raised over £17m; a record-breaking year. Well done to all of them!

There's lots of fashion shows going on too, like Tara's Childline show that raised over £3,500 and Anne-Marie's event for Maggie's Centres. I think our favourite is the Fabulous Frocks Fashion show, organised by the Daughters of Destiny, because they satisfy Jonno's soft-spot for alliteration but also for coming up with such a great way of using Justgiving.

Lots of footballing action on JG. From mascots to players to fans, they're all there.

There's also a fair bit of fasting. Kaye and Alison deprived themselves of food to fundraise, something a few of us here would definitely struggle with.

Amazingly, you can even fundraise when you've gone fishing.

Finally, we're still in love with Flickr. Add us as contacts and track all the goings-on in and around JG Towers, as well as our increasing obsession with getting Moo cards printed. We love those guys.

Oh, and one more thing:

We love it (we're all on there). You love it (it's one of our biggest referrers). More on the powers of the mighty FB very soon.

It's oh so quiet

Yeah sorry about that. Radio silence. All quiet on the western front. We're all still here, we promise.

There's literally a metric ton of cool stuff just on the horizon and we're working at getting it all perfect.

And I'm waiting for Jonno to hurry up with his next A-Z post.

Nudge.

HappyBean

Yesterday we had a visit from Korea's Beautiful Foundation. They run a website over there that is similar to Justgiving called HappyBean. Their mascot is the aforementioned HappyBean (who, if you haven't figured it out yet, signifies donations) and here he is in all his glory, in mobile phone trinket form:

Check out their site here, we think the design is brilliant!

E is for...

E is Easter. Yes it's been and gone this year, but in the midst of all that chocolate, bunnies and suggestive fertile imagery, there's fundraising going on too.

One of our favourite Easter appeals was from a chap called Marc. He asked his friends if they felt guilty gorging themselves on chocolate wrapped in extravagant flashy boxes and prompted them to donate the cost of an Egg to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal London Hospital. Inspired stuff.

E is also for Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Marathon is always big and only happened the other week. Carl embarked on 'the biggest challenge of his life' by taking part when only in October he was a long way away from being 'race fit'. Cris and Nancy ran for the MicroLoan Foundation and raised nearly £1500 this year.

Let's not forget the Edinburgh MoonWalk either. The London event was another roaring success but the Edinburgh Moonwalk takes place in a few short weeks. Joanna and the Silver Bullets team are nearly at their target, and Georgie and her team are nearly there too along with hundreds of others. Moonwalkers have raised more money online this year than ever before.

E is for Espanol. Thanks to Adriana's Great North Run page we now know that solo haz click donde dice is spanish for all you have to do is click where it says. Useful when on holiday. Roberto also educated us with por favor patrocineme en linea, which is the most important phrase of all: please sponsor me now.

Finally E is also for envelope stuffing. There's quite alot of it going on at JG Towers, mostly by the intrepid finance team. Here's a picture of lots and lots of Gift Aid claims:

We're never put off by our Gift Aid mountain. They get stuffed into envelopes and off they go.

One day we hope all the paper won't be necessary. Jonno's back with the big F-words soon.

Creative Wanted

Caroline is heading off to the wilds of Devon, so we're looking for a brand new Content Editor here at JG Towers.

You can check out the full job spec, as well as all the other current vacancies (we need loads of developers please) at our jobs page.