Justgiving's blog

Stay Frosty

Bit of blog silence. Sorry about that. Lots happening as usual.

Best place to see what's going chez JG is on Flickr, so here's a nice slideshow for you:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

We've been doing paper prototyping.

We've been talking to users.

We've been to the park.

We're eating lots of soup because it's cold.

There's still weekly (if not daily) doses of cake around.

We've been looking at lots of numbers, sorting them in rows and putting them into graphs with marble backgrounds.

We've lost a few great people and found some lovely new ones. More on them later.

We've also been adding friends like mad on MySpace and pushing out MOO cards.

Email me something brilliant that's not:

a) a fake John Lewis voucher

b) that free iPhone competition I don't remember entering but win about 10 times a day, or

c) a virus

and I'll send you a 10% discount code.

On top of all that, we've been building lots of cool stuff for fundraising pages that we're going to be releasing before Christmas. Because it's the season.

MySpace Widgets are live!

Remember our flash widget? This little guy:

Well, this morning we've rolled out a brand new version that is fully compatible with MySpace. They've been kind enough to help out getting it working. Yay MySpace.

 

You'll find the new version in the usual place; just click the 'promote this page' link on any fundraising page to grab the code. It's tabbed next to the original version (which works on sites like typepad, blogger, vox, xanga and wherever else the kids are hanging out these days).

The fat pets are back

Guess what - it's Pet Fit Club time again!

This year six portly dogs and two massive moggies (like George here) are taking part in the challenge to lose weight and shape up - and raise some money for PDSA while they're at it.

You can see all of the porky pets here - and sponsor their weight loss efforts!

Good luck to them all.

Yay! MOO Discounts!

Every year, we meet hundreds of people with justgiving pages. In real life, away from the Internets. There are always a few people who have made some cards with their justgiving page address on them. 

We always think what a brilliant idea that is, and how great it would be if we offered that to everyone. After all, not everyone has all the email addresses they're going to need to hand, and some justgivers have told us it's nice to have an actual thing they can give to their supporters instead of just emails. Physical stuff is good.

So, with the help of our friends at MOO, we're doing a little experiment.

MOO make little minicards, they're a bit like business cards except they're half the size and 100% less boring.

They come in packs of 100 and they're printed with your very own photos, which you can either upload yourself or pull in from the most popular photo sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook.

Here at JG we use them as business cards, but we've run into fundraisers who've used them to promote their fundraising pages. These are mine:

Here's why minicards work brilliantly alongside justgiving pages:

- they fit in your wallet, and consequently the wallets of your friends

- they're not sponsorship forms, so no hassle

- they're something memorable and special to give to people who can't sponsor you there and then, but intend to

- you can personalise them as much as you want (100 photos = 100 unique minicards)

- you can give them to people in the pub whose email addresses you don't have

So what's the deal?

You can order a set of minicards with a 10% discount by entering the promo code that you'll find in your inbox from us. If you haven't received an email, then let me know by emailing me direct with the address of your justgiving page and we'll send it over.

Don't worry if you haven't got any photos to use, there are tons of professional designs on MOO already.

So, get those cards out there. Let us know if it works. You can get started right here.

Congratulations to Emily!

Just a quick shout out to one of our favorite fundraisers, Emily Thackray. You might remember Emily as the courageous lass who took part in the women's Hydro Active 5k on oxygen and became one of our 'fundraisers of the month' back in 2006. And you might also remember that she got a new set of lungs earlier this year.

Emily has put those new lungs to work: she's been busy campainging for organ donation and on Saturday she got married!!! Here she is in all her bride-ly glory.

Heartfelt congratulations to Emily and Adam from all of us here at JG....Yay!

P.S. if you haven't signed up as an organ donor yet you can do it online here.