Justgiving's blog

A Big Request

OK so for ages now, the helpdesk and suggestions boxes have been full of fundraisers asking for two things:

- When I build a page, make sure it gets saved sooner because I could lose all my work while I'm editing it. And I've had to redo it. Grrrr.

- I want to use the rad web address I had for my event last year. Pleeease may I?

So last night, we made some changes to the page creation process. Pages are saved sooner, the system automatically tells you which URLs are free, and best of all, you can use any of the old page addresses you've used in the past, without your old page being deleted!

Here's what it looks like:

Build a page right now and check it out.

A quick trip to Ethiopia

RETRAK have only got a few places left for their trek to the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia. Karla from the charity wanted to let everyone know about this original trek. She says:

'The Simiens are one of Ethiopia's most beautiful ranges. It's a 5 day challenge that gives you the opportunity to visit one of the very first UNESCO World Heritage Sites. You'll also get to visit RETRAK's project in Addis Ababa, seeing first-hand how your sponsorship brings hope and purpose to the lives of street children.'

If you want to find out more then you can download an information pack here. There's literally only a few places left however, so get your skates on.

Friday round-up

It's one of those fridays. Those pre-bank-holiday fridays. The friday where you forgot to book the day off to create a glorious four day weekend. And you're at work with the handful of other folk who also forgot to book that friday off. Dang.

So here's a retrospective of the last few days from the JG lair:

- Jonno was trying out some new webinar software, and in so doing managed to become qualified in webinar delivery, and could probably put letters after his name to prove it.

(It's stuck to his in-tray)

- We celebrated 5,000 people using our first Facebook app. At the time of writing we're at 5,132. We hope you're all doing well with it.

- Staying with a Facebooky theme, Ro made an appreciation group for our favourite local eatery, Daddy Donkey. Sure enough, they've put a sign outside their van on Leather Lane saying so, and this week alone 127 fellow Daddy D lovers have joined up, expressing their joy for all things large and semi-mexican. It's full of photos like this:

- Kai broke his PC in full blue-screen-of-death glory, just as we were starting our top secret Moo Stickers project.

- I met a guy in our local (which fyi is here) with the same Threadless tee as me, so we took a picture:

- Tom had his socks stolen at the gym. Seriously, who steals socks? At the gym?

- We all went for a cookery lesson in the city:

And we managed to do some work too. Enjoy the long weekend.

Newbie Avalanche

The Towers have been awash with new talent of late. Here's a shortlist of recent additions:

Sophie is our new content editor. This is good news because no longer will you have to put up with my error-ridden, grammatically-suspect copy. In fact, this is probably the last unedited post I'll ever be allowed to write. Sophie's done lots of cool stuff in the past, including:

- working on projects for the BBC
- bullying Will at school in the early 90s
- writing things that got printed in proper newspapers

Carly is our new Accounts Assistant, part of the ever-increasing finance empire here at JG. Her hobbies include:

- being a 'proper' Londoner
- sunburn
- putting up with Tim talking about football
- making the rest of us feel really, really old (she's 18!)

Gemma is new on the consumer helpdesk. She comes from an events fundraising background having worked at Two Large Charities in the past. Gemma enjoys:

- baking pies
- Simon Pegg
- being the best charity shop shopper in the whole of the UK

Matt is our new Technical Architect. He's on paternity leave right now. Things Matt has been up to recently include:

- de-flooding his car
- doing amazing stuff with Facebook
- becoming a dad (congrats from us all!)

Richard has come back to the JG fold after leaving in 2005. He's the lead developer on the product team and is helping to drive lots of cool projects. He's a big fan of:

- Open Source
- Subway coupons
- Pressing 'reply-to-all' in a questionably appropriate manner

Naren is a new developer on Jason's sys-dev team. Naren's skills include:

- working on explosives (seriously)
- having an insane music collection
- being the oldest employee who reads comics

Pranav is from India originally and is our new test analyst. His top three notable features are:

- studying in the USA, at George Washington University
- having a pharmacy degree
- actually liking public transport in London

So there you have it. A true plethora of new talent. Welcome aboard everyone; onward and upward!

More stars

I am happy to report that after my last shout out we've got two more homepage stars. Man, these guys are TOUGH.

First off is the amazing team of personal trainers Dan and Rob, who are planning the ultramarathon to end all ultramarathons - and it finishes at the Rugby World Cup. They're taking on....let's see....a cross channel swim, a 1120 mile cycle ride and to top it all off, a 262 mile run. Gosh I am exhausted just writing this out.

Our second new star this week is Chris Moon MBE. Chris is a double amputee who has completed the gruelling Marathon De Sables in the past. And now he's off on his cycle to Cambodia on another challenge.

Best of luck to all these guys.

BTW if you are reading this there is a chance that YOU TOO could be like Chris, Rob and Dan and appear on the Justgiving.com homepage. No ultratriathlon or cycle ride required though - we are looking for good pics of ordinary people doing some extrordinary fundraising. We've got tons of sporty people up on the homepage - I need some non-sporty people too! So if you're shaving your head, bellydancing, sitting in a bath of baked beans, clowning, busking or whatever send me a snap. Find out how here.   

Some more stats!

A pretty cool growth chart of our first Facebook app.

Time for some Numbers

King of Excel Jonno has come up with some TV advert-style stats that we'd like to share.

Every 1 minute 9 seconds a fundraising page is made on JG.

Every 7.8 seconds a donation is made on JG.

In April (which is when the London Marathon is), this changes to:

A new page every 43 seconds and a donation every 5 seconds.

These figures were produced from our January to May 2007 stats. Isn't scalability marvellous?

Widget Fundraising

Here at JG we've long been impressed by the efforts of Team SMARTies. They're doing a very original driving challenge and have been enormously successful with our widget. Here's their story.

Who We Are: Andrew McGill and Natalya Jagger 

What we are doing:

Over the August bank holiday weekend (25^th -27^th) we will be taking part in a charity event in memory of Andrew's daughter, Rose Emma McGill. Our team will be known as "Team SMARTies" and consists of Andrew, as the driver, & Natalya, as the navigator. We will be travelling 1,000 miles around the UK in a SMART Roadster Brabus Coupe and wearing SMART attire - think ballgowns and top hat and tails! The target is to raise 5,000 pounds. To sponsor us just visit www.justgiving.com/rosemcgill

About Rose:

Rose was an up and coming designer and was featured at the New Designers Exhibition in June 2006. Sadly, that same month the family was devastated when Rose was diagnosed with a Grade 4 malignant brain tumour. Following surgery to remove the tumour treatment was started straight away, and, on 26th October 2006 Rose graduated with honours from Liverpool Hope University. Just two weeks later Rose was admitted to hospital and sadly passed away on 11th November 2006. We are hoping to raise money for Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology, Wirral where Rose received her radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Our Fundraising Techniques:
 

Thanks to the web we have been able to spread the word about our fundraising efforts in loads of ways!

First of all we have used the Justgiving Widget in our own blogs, our website and many of our friends have also placed the widget on their sites too. That means we get bonus clicks through here, over there, on here and many other places too! To help people get the correct code we have a section on our website where you can find all the widgets and the codes you need to add them to your website or blog.

Ruth, a special friend of ours, really grasped the online fundraising idea when she started THIS campaign. Through her blog, Ruth decided to write a post saying “we will donate a further 50p a comment on this post up to a limit of £25… so come on folks.......WE NEED 50 COMMENTS....it'll only take a moment of your time”. As the comments came flooding in, Andrew, Rose’s Father offered to donate 50p for comments 51 to 100. It really brought our little blogging community together and it took just a few days to reach over 100 comments. A fabulous idea that worked so well!

For Easter, Ruth and Claire launched The Easter Bunnies Egg Hunt. Anyone could take part all they had to do was click on this little guy:

Whenever they saw him he would transport them to a Blog or Site which contained the answer to the question that had been set. There was also an Easter Craft competition and an Easter Joke contest! Participants had the option of donating £2 to Rose’s Tribute Fund and we raised a fantastic £123! We hope to do many more online events like these as they are so enjoyable and a great way to keep Rose’s memory alive and bring attention to the work of Clatterbridge Cancer Campaign.

We found another great way to let people know about our fundraising efforts and the items we have up for Auction was to make a post on websites that we use. With the permission of the site owners we made posts here, on here, over there and various other sites.

Ways people can help:

Make a donation - Just go to www.justgiving.com/rosemcgill

Make a bid on OUR AUCTION ITEMS

Donate an Auction item/s - Businesses and/or individuals can donate Auction items in return for special thanks on the car. We already have various items for Auction on our website and the Liverpool FC autographed football recently sold for £250!

Display our Justgiving Widget - Do you have a website/blog or other web based ‘thing’? Displaying our Justgiving Widget could help us generate further interest in our fundraising and the work of Clatterbridge Cancer Campaign

All of the Code needed to display the Widgets can be found in our HELP US section on our website