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If you have been following the news about the floods all over England you're probably aware of the misery and suffering of people who have lost their homes and livelihoods in this extreme weather.
You can help make a difference to the flood victims by supporting the South Yorkshire Community Foundation's Flood Relief fundraising page, or the British Red Cross's official donation page.
photo credit: REUTERS/Darren Staples
The Justgiving Facebook app has arrived!
We are in your profile
What does it do?
The Justgiving app, built by us, adds a dynamic progress bar to your profile, which references a fundraising page on Justgiving.
This could be your own fundraising page, one of your friends, a big appeal page or belong to a complete stranger.
The profile view looks like this:
As you can see it pulls in the image from your page, your progress, what you're doing and the charity you're raising funds for. Tidy.
In the application view you get something a bit more like this:
You can add the pages you're supporting, see the most recent contributions (including comments!), and you can see who out of your Facebook friends is supporting that page too. It's a great way to get all your sponsors to show their support via their profiles too.
Where do I get it?
You can add the application at http://apps.facebook.com/justgiving
You'll need to have a Facebook account and to log-in to get this working.
It will tell you what the most popular pages are on Facebook right now, so if you've got nobody to support, why not pick one of them?
Let us know what you think, we hope you have as much fun using it as we had building it.
Hello!
Thought it was time to check in and tell you about a few more of our fab homepage stars. In the 'traditional fundraising' ring there's Rob, who, according to my calculations, should be somewhere in Wisconsin as I write, as part of his cross-country USA cycle ride. 4200 miles for Cancer Research UK - now that's what I call using your summer break!
Moving on, we've got two new groups of stars who have found some more unusual ways to raise lots of dosh for good causes.
First up is four lads from Deepcut barracks, who are planning to climb to the height of Mt. Everest's base camp (that's higher than most mountains in the world ever) on their step machines at the gym to raise money for Hope for Children. The challenge is over 24 hours, which means each fella's got 12 hours on the steppers. Wow. Good luck to them.
And finally, there's the Urban Ironing Collective, who will come and iron anyplace in London for you for a donation of £15 to Cancer Research UK. So far they've ironed outside Buckingham Palace, on the central reservation in Oxford Circus, down Horseguards Parade, In St. James Park, outside the Ritz, and pretty much everywhere else in London. You can see all in their Flickr group here. I never thought I'd say this but yay ironing!
Anyways, if you too want to join these fabulous stars on our homepage here's how...
There must be something like a million blog posts about Apple's iPhone right now.
So one more can't hurt.
Jonno came back from his travels in the US this morning. He had two things with him.
The first is his brand new moustache:
'But they said I couldn't get into Mexico without one!'
And the second is a shot of the JG homepage running on the iPhone:
WANT.
Good work Jonno.
It's high-time for some tips. Everyone loves tips.
New readers might not have found the Clinic series we did earlier on in the year, which gives an insider's view on raising funds effectively on Justgiving.
It's especially useful for those out there who've got hefty targets to hit, but I think it's fair to say every fundraiser wants to do their best and there's some pretty nifty techniques on how to maximise the cash with the minimum amount of stress.
Check out the clinic category here, some of the topics covered include using widgets and RSS feeds, choosing a good URL, printing stuff out to give to your friends and lots more.
*Drumroll*
Say hello to our new widget.
It rocks a great deal harder than our last one, and this is why:
- It works pretty much everywhere.
- It displays the most recent comments from donors. Very cool.
- It's got a nice animated menu, and a scrolly title.
- It tells you more about the charity involved with the event or appeal.
- You can grab the code to share the widget, from within the widget. It can even copy itself to your clipboard for you. Madness.
- It looks nicer and the dimensions will make it fit in more blog sidebars.
This is all stuff you lot told us you wanted, so we hope you like it. Go grab it now and wear it with pride on your blog, network profile or wherever. Make sure your friends host it too!
You can find the new widget code by clicking on the 'promote this page' link on any Justgiving fundraising page, just like before. It's also in your account if you log-in.
And if you're into a mildly popular site called facebook...
It's all about apps.facebook.com/justgiving for you guys.
Two weeks ago, the Justgiving Allstars ventured out of Clerkenwell and northwards for what was the first of hopefully many Cancer Research UK charity football tournaments.
Vicious, fearsome and deadly. These were just some of the wonderful smells originating from stalwart semi-employee James Grieves’ kitbag.
It’s been a while since we threw down the gauntlet to see if anyone would play us at a game of kickaround, and in true JG fashion, we went into all the matches with the same mindset as before: no Google maps print-out and only our cabbie-level knowledge of London. That’s how street we are with James Casey in the team. Sadly, he was in Coventry. So we were a little lost. Surprisingly, we made it on time.
As always, all the matches went down to the wire with some truly golden moments. Rohit scored an amazing equaliser in one game, with a stunning Beckham style free-kick. Resident kiwi Josie took to covering every blade of the pitch, making tackles here, there and everywhere. Even Molly “Posh” Loyd covered every on-target shot as our number one goalie. To the dismay of the JG faithful, the opposition soon latched on to the fact that if they shot the ball off-target, Molly would chase it down and then guide the ball into the back of the net.
If you think you’ve got what it takes to challenge us, then send an email and let’s go.
Londoners out there won't have been able to avoid the torrential publicity around the Tour de France. There's been celeb bike giveaways and all sorts.
Aside from the yellow jerseys though, there's other bikey achievements going on at the same time. A team representing Jole Rider's bikes4Africa campaign will have completed 777 miles across 7 countries in 7 days, raising enough money to send 777 bikes to Africa so kids can ride to school.
The Allsevens team will have cycled to all 7 previous Tour de France departure cities when they reach the start of this year's event, which funnily enough starts on 07/07/07. Got the pattern yet?
Check out their fundraising page for more info, and if you've got £15 (for shipping) and an unused bike in your shed then visit their website so it can be put to good use. The Allsevens have a blog too which has got up-to-date info on their progress, as well as pictures of their very smart outfits. Best of luck guys.
Golf obviously. It's not easy being the only golfer in an office of forty or so non-golfing folk. There's the football banter which you can't join in with, nobody sharing your joy of the Masters being shown on BBC HD, and absolutely no way you can practice your putting on the lovely new carpet.
Still in the face of such adversity, that doesn't stop the golfing pedigree out in the extended Justgiving universe. Many non-golfers caught up with how uncool they think golf is, can't visualise an amazing fundraising event beyond the tried-and-tested charity golf day. Well, Andrew and his golfing buddies can now put that right.
I've got a 4 iron, and I know how to use it
Andrew, Steve and Kieran undertook the gargantuan task of 126 different holes of golf in one day a few weeks ago. On foot too, none of that golf buggy nonsense (fun as they may be). In numbers, that's 44,000 yards, par 504, 34 pairs of socks, 6 shirts, 8 golf trolley batteries, 14 golf balls, 8 pairs of shoes and one of those rather large pots of vaseline. They started at 4am in Moor Park and finished up at West Herts golf club just before 9pm, even managing to squeeze a cheeky pint in around 6pm.
To you non-golfers out there, that's a stunning achievement. Normally it's 18 holes in about 3-4 hours. In the same place. Without vaseline.
Best of all they've raised nearly £6,500 for the MS Trust. To find out about their caddie Fred the Dog, flashing golf balls, bleeding toes, Andrew's dire hook and a stunning bogey bogey finish, read the full story on their fundraising page.
G is also for Gift Aid. But you knew that already.
A quick call to action today. Registration for Maternity Worldwide's Ethiopia Bike Ride Challenge closes down very soon. It's starting in late October this year and is certainly one of the most original bike challenges we've seen on JG for a while.
The cycle starts in the capital Addis Ababa and finishes up at Gimbie, in Western Ethiopia. Gimbie is home to one of MW's projects so you'll see real results from Maternity Worldwide's work.
To get more of an idea of what to expect, check out the "diaries" of Annabel and Lucy who took part in the 2006 challenge.
Sound good? Get more info and register here, but be quick!
