Justgiving's blog

Our New Friends

I think we all blog less in January. That's my opening excuse.

Anyway, we've got some exciting news.

We've recently made friends with MOO.

MOO.com print your photos onto real life stuff - like minicards, postcards, greeting cards and stickers. Yes, even stickers. We use them as business cards and they are 150% more fun than your business cards.

We've been long-time MOO fanboys here at JG and it's brilliant to be proper friends.

You lot have been asking for something to print out so that you can give your Justgiving page url to people you meet out and about. Sponsorship forms still aren't very pocket-friendly.

Well here's the solution. MOO stuff is really cheap and as customisable as it gets. If none of this makes sense yet, check out what Francis has done with his minicards for the London Marathon:

You can do it too with your own photos. Got 100 different photos? You'll get 100 different cards so your friends can choose which one they want.

Nice way to ask for support isn't it?

So, check out our own special MOO site below and order your very own little boxes of printed joy today:

www.moo.com/justgiving

Resolutions

A happy 2008 to all. We hope you had a suitably groovy New Year.

The Christmas tree is gone. Much hoovering was required:

We're making some changes to the site very soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

More details when it happens!

Festive Flickr & YouTube Puns

Nope. I can't think of any today.

Anyway, YouTube and Flickr integration on fundraising pages has gone live this morning. It looks a little bit like this:

If you have a fundraising page, log-in to your account to get started.

Check out Laura's page in full to see it in action:

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).

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.

Sporting

Let's ignore all the relevant sporting roundups from this past weekend. I think we won something. Maybe two things.

Anyway, one of my favourite European Tour golfers Ian Poulter (the one with the hair/trousers etc), recently got married to long-term partner Katie.

Considering that professional golfers are doing rather well these days (even when they don't win anything), they've chucked out the John Lewis gift list for a suite of fundraising pages instead; one for Dreamflight and one for the Willow Foundation.

He'll win a major next season. Seriously.

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.

Justgiving + Facebook

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.

Widget 2.0

*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.

Ethiopian Summer

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!

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.

Table Switching

A timely product update and one of the biggest requests since the beginning of the interweb: welcome to table control.

What's that then?

Up until the end of last week you had no control over what appeared in the big donations table on your fundraising page. Well, now you do (click to go large):

Cool. How do I do it?

Edit your current fundraising page by logging-in to your account and you'll be able to switch each column on or off at your leisure. Don't worry, the columns will resize themselves so your page won't look all unjustified or anything.

Don't want to show the donation dates? Turn them off.

Embarrassed to see everyone's name or their amounts? They can go too.

Here's a few screengrabs from live pages already using this feature:

Kim's turned off her donation amounts and Gift Aid for her VSO Kilimanjaro challenge.

Graeme's switched off the donation dates on his London Triathlon page.

You can get rid of all the columns if you wish, but our recommendation is to always leave the comments switched on, since it's the comments that keep your fundraising page sticky and lets your supporters make their mark.

Let us know what you think! More cool stuff coming soon.

The All New Adventures of Us

Our new 'About Us' section has just gone live. It's much better than the old one and has pictures of everyone, lots more about what makes us tick and reasons why you should have sent us your CV already.

Well done Kai for making it look so lovely.

New stars...

Hey if you've been on the Justgiving homepage recently you might've noticed that we've got four new smiley faces in our fundraisers gallery.

FIrst there's Tali and Em, collectively known as the "Guatemala Girls", who are taking their fundraising to Tibet. Good luck ladies!

Next, we've got our second footie-mad cyclist- you may remember Keith the chef, who cycled to 20 football grounds in 12 days- well, the gauntlet was thrown down and the challenge has now been taken up by Jamie Penfold, who is cycling to all English premiership grounds starting this Saturday. Oh, and if you sponsor Jamie, you could win a signed English team away top, some English team memorabilia or a Sky Sports goodie bag.

Finally there's Angus Macfadyen, who is running the London Marathon - on crutches. I cannot begin to imagine what a challenge he's got ahead of him. However, it sounds like he's up to the task as he's already clocked 440 miles on his crutches, using his good leg. What a trouper!

Good luck to all our new fundraising superstars!!!

Oh, and if you'd like to join our gallery of stars yourself, here's how...

Digg & Del.icio.us

If you scroll to the bottom of a fundraising page then underneath the totals, you'll see two new links next to the old RSS links, a bit like this:

If you know what Digg and del.icio.us are, then they should be fairly self explanatory.

If not, then read on.

What's Digg?

Digg is a great way to promote the news that's important to you. Here's an explanation from their site:

"...everything on Digg is submitted by our community (that would be you). After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see."

Digg is a great way of generating some free extra traffic to your fundraising page, especially if you have a particularly good story. We've seen some great examples in the past of Justgiving pages being Dugg, and so this link makes it lots easier to start a new Digg.

Check out what we've been digging. Digg is very tech-news heavy in general, but many special interest stories (like Global Rich List) break through to the front page, so have a play around with it.
 

And what's Del.icio.us?

You know when you bookmark stuff using your browser, those bookmarks are only available on that particular computer, running that browser?

Well del.icio.us lets you bookmark online, so all your sites are collected together under one account. You can also tag and describe your bookmarks so you remember what they are. Better still, since it's all networked, you can see if other people have been bookmarking the same sites as you and then check out other similar and popular sites you might not have heard of.

If you want to bookmark your page quickly, then click this link, and you can do the same for other fundraising pages you think are cool.

Here's a list of stuff tagged 'Justgiving' for example. We hope you find these new features useful and they help you get your page further into the wild.

Justgiving 2.0

We're not going into too much detail for now, but here's two new features which are launching very soon:

Tags! That's not all:

Not actual size!

That's right, Digg and Del.icio.us links on fundraising pages! If that means nothing, don't worry, we'll explain everything soon enough when these two new features have been launched, and what they mean for you.

Badges back in fashion

The flash-enabled Widget is nearly here. But we know you can't wait for stuff, so we've imported the Justgiving Badge from our American cousins at Firstgiving.

The badge is a simple button that links to your fundraising page. It's not got as many features as the widget does, but it's still useful and more fun than hyperlinks.

You can find them in the same section as the widget, just click 'Promote this Page' on any Justgiving fundraising page and you'll find the code you need. There are three lovely designs to choose from, so here's three lovely examples:

We <3 Innocent

We like Innocent. They make healthy stuff, have a stable relationship with putting astroturf on things and extract roughly a tenner a week from James' wallet for mashed fruit.

My gaggle of RSS feeds led me to their blog yesterday. Four Innocenters are taking part in this year's London Marathon on behalf of Wellchild and have made a super fundraising page. That in itself was an honour, especially to James who would marry them all if only he were able.

But look! Scroll down a bit and look on the right hand side. Widget best-practice! Doesn't it look lovely? They've even renamed it a 'fundraising 'ometer'. I'm speechless.

We all hope you smash your £6k target girls. Give us a shout if you need some tips.

Widgets arrive in time for Christmas

We've just released our brand new Justgiving Widget! For the uninitiated, widgets have been all the rage this year and will continue to dominate webby stuff in 2007.

Basically, instead of a rather boring hyperlink to post on your blog, you can now put one of these:

This is Ben's page, and if Ben were the sort of chap to have a blog (he works in finance so he doesn't) then there it would proudly sit as an indication of how his progress is going.

Want one? Click on the 'Promote this page' link under the thermometer on any fundraising page and you'll get the html code you need. If you're a pagebuilder then you'll find out more about the Widget by logging in to your account.

Let battle commence

"She fell over, she fell over"

Football has a habit of producing ferocious battles between sworn enemies. Wide-eyed stares, crunching tackles and crashing elbows have been a feature of footballing wars of attrition for decades.

But how about this for the grudge match of all time...Good vs Evil.

Yes indeed: Superman lining up against Darth Vader, The Incredible Hulk man-marking Hannibal Lecter and Super Ted contesting 50/50s with Count Dracula. Game on!

Paul Tinworth and his mates were supping a few lagers in the pub, as you do, when they decided it would be amusing to stage a game of football between a team of smurfs and a team of garden gnomes (I want some of what you were drinking, Paul). The match was a huge success and raised a tidy sum for charity, so the event is being repeated. Only this time it's Super Heroes vs Super Villains.

Batman, Robin and Buzz Lightyear will go toe to toe with Dr Evil, Darth Maul and Mumm-Raa at Wooodford Park, Woodley, on Sunday 29 October. Pity the poor referee.

The two teams have put aside rivalry, animosity and taking over the world to raise funds for Cancer Research. Check out their page and sponsor them here.

Expect some flying tackles. Boom, tish.

No more pledges - thank you for your comments

Thank you to all of you who have written to us, or posted comments on our blog, in response to our email on the removal of the pledging facility on Justgiving. We really appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback.

As I read your comments, I noticed some key misunderstandings about our service, which I wanted to dispel:

• Bar the removal of the “pay on completion” function on your fundraising pages, our service is unchanged. Justgiving continues to enable people to make a credit or debit card donation to your fundraising page. As Stef Hall commented, this is the preferred option for the vast majority of donors on Justgiving (90% of them to be precise) and tens of thousands of Justgiving pages already operate without the pledging option, and performing extremely well.
• Pledges that have already been made to your page will be processed as normal. There is absolutely nothing for your donors, or yourself, to do.

Thank you to those of you, like Ed Bird, for suggesting a pledging facility 'lite', which would enable potential donors to leave their email address on the page and receive an automatic reminder after the event.

Unfortunately, this model has been tested in the past, and proven to be largely unsuccessful: donors just do not respond to automatic emails, and charities lose out. What donors do appreciate is a personal message from you, so the best way to communicate with those donors who prefer to give after the event is to email them then.

I would like to assure you that we never make changes to our fundraising pages without careful consideration. It is important to remember that we are doing this to comply with the highest possible levels of online security, which will be expected of all online merchants by June 2007. We simply decided to remain ahead of the game. Increased security, along with real-time processing of donations, will result in more money being raised for charity.

Our product development team will review your comments and suggestions carefully over the next few days and weeks. Please continue to send us your feedback. Your comments are greatly appreciated.

Anne-Marie Huby
Managing Director
Justgiving

Enhanced security on Justgiving – what it means for you

September will see a major upgrade of Justgiving’s donation processing system. One key consequence of this change is that we will no longer be able to support the processing of pledges – the ‘pay on completion’ option on your fundraising page.

Please take a moment to read our simple six-point explanation of how this came about, and what it means for your fundraising page.

1. How do pledges currently work?

When a donor chooses to pledge rather than donate right away, Justgiving captures their full card details and only debits the card after the event has been completed.  Up until that point, ‘pledgers’ can cancel or amend their gift at any time.

2. Why is Justgiving making this change?

In September, Justgiving will introduce a cutting-edge, real-time authorisation system that will deliver the latest security and fraud-prevention techniques to your donors.

Not only will this help further reassure your donors that online giving is highly secure, but it will also benefit charities by reducing the number of donation cancellations and charge-backs (where a donation is contested by the card owner and refunded via their credit card company).

Pledges need to be phased out because they will not be compatible with the enhanced security environment that we will deploy in September.

For instance, we will start asking donors to enter the 3-digit security code at the back of their cards. Because this code authenticates the donor as the rightful owner of the card, it cannot be stored in any circumstances by Justgiving.

Because pledges involve the storage of a donor’s card details until the transaction can be processed, we will no longer be able to support them under our new security rules in September.   

Though pledges are popular in a minority of cases, we believe that the benefits of enhanced security will vastly outweigh the loss of pledges.

3. What will happen to pledges already made?

Pledges that have already been made will continue to be processed in the ‘traditional’ way. There is absolutely nothing for your donors, or yourself, to do.

4. When will the pledging option be removed?

Donors will no longer be able to make a pledge through your page from Monday 21st August. 

5. Will I raise less because of this change?

Many Justgiving pages are already operating without the pledging option, and doing equally well in the long run.

6. What if my donors do not wish to donate right away?

To ensure you raise as much as you would without the pledging option, it is important to send out another round of emails to friends and family right after your event, to encourage those who have yet to donate. It is a good time to refresh your page with a new photo and a message, to show them you actually made it!

If you have sponsors who strongly do not wish to donate until after you have completed your fundraising event / activity, suggest a date (i.e. 1 day after you event) when they can return to your fundraising page and make a donation.

If you have any questions or suggestions about this change please do email us.

RSS RockSS

Every single fundraising page on Justgiving now has its very own RSS feed!

It's something that a fair few of our users have been asking for, so we've gladly obliged.

To subcribe, all you need to do is scroll to the bottom of the fundraising page you want to monitor and then import the RSS data into your current reader.

Here's a working example: my best friend Dave is currently cycling from John o'Groats to Land's End (right now he's getting very cold and wet in the highlands somewhere) and doing some fundraising for Rainer. Here is his page and here are the instructions for me to track his donations. Now I can keep updated on his fundraising without having to keep checking the page directly, since I use Google Sidebar as my RSS reader and any new donations will pop into my web clips section. Easy.

So if you'd like to track your own page more effectively, or the page of someone you know, then get subscribing to those feeds!

If RSS means absolutely nothing at all to you then check out the BBC's explanation. They say it better than I can.

Welcome to the new Justgiving blog

Welcome to our new look Justgiving blog.  We've re-vamped our blog to bring you more features, colour, information and in true Justgiving style - make it easier to use.

This blog is designed for people who use Justgiving to build personal fundraising pages and require support in maximising online donations. If you work for one of our charity members, please visit our charity blog where you'll find useful service updates and case studies .

So here it is - the Justgiving blog.  Take a look at the categories we'll be posting against on the left hand side. Fundraiser of the month profiles fundraisers who have raised substantial amounts of money for charity; Inspiration for fundraisers provides you with useful hints and tips on how to raise more money online; New on Justgiving updates you on the new features we're working on to make Justgiving even easier; and News from JG Towers is where we'll ramble on about anything that interests us or makes us laugh.

Furthermore, access other fundraisers' blogs via the links on the right hand side.

So have a look around and add comments to our posts. If you think we could do better, give me a shout at james.casey@justgiving.com

Thanks

Get a Justgiving logo of your very own....

Hey, in case you haven't noticed yet we've got a hip new logo (at last). And we want to share it with you. If you're fundraising with Justgiving or one of our fab charity clients, why not grab our new logo for your print and web marketing materials?

We've put together a page of every possible logo permutation, which you can find here.

- Elizabeth

Your photo on the Justgiving homepage

Do you want to gain extra exposure for your fundraising effort? How about having your photo featured in the fundraisers' gallery on the Justgiving home page! (just like Katie here.)

All you need to do is to email us your photo plus the short web address of your fundraising page to photos@justgiving.com. We’re looking for great photos of you fundraising, whether that means running, cycling, or even having your head shaved! Photos of you fundraising on your own or as part of a team are equally welcomed. If you are fundraising in memory or in honour of someone else please be sure to send us a photo of yourself, rather than the person you are fundraising on behalf of.

Also, please make sure that you've got a few donations on your fundraising page before sending us your photo-- remember, we're using your pages as examples of how online fundraising works!

Not every photo we receive will be posted on the homepage but if your image is chosen we will let you know promptly. Your photo will stay up on the Justgiving.com homepage for approximately 1-2 months, in rotation with other photos. (just keep on refreshing the homepage!)

If you do not hear from us within five working days of sending us your photo please assume that your submission was not successful on that occasion. We are sorry not to be able to respond individually to every request. Justgiving selects photos at its absolute discretion.

- Elizabeth

So Fresh, So Clean

You all have no idea how pleased we are to see the back of our old logo.

Liz is now the 'logo police' so if anyone spots the old logo lurking on a fundraising page somewhere or in some other dingy corner of the site then drop us a line.

A big thanks to our CTO Dom, who flicked the virtual switch at stupid o'clock this morning, and to Liz who did the bulk of the work. Thanks to all our user testers too and to everyone that likes our new look! Let us know what you think! This is just the beginning folks...

- Simon

Justgiving USA becomes Firstgiving

Great excitement over the pond today as our sister company in the States undergoes a makeover and becomes Firstgiving.

It's still Justgiving USA in all but name, but with a brand new super snazzy site and logo. Doesn't it look smart!

Big hello to our friends in the Firstgiving office in Boston, MA - Mark, Thos, Maggie, Kurt, Beth, James and Laurel. If you are a US-registered charity, or want to raise money for one, pay them a visit here.

- James G

Welcome to Oxfam

We've hanging out the bunting this week and extending a warm Justgiving welcome to our newest charity partner - Oxfam.

Oxfam is a development, relief, and campaigning organisation that works with others to find lasting solutions to poverty and suffering around the world. It was formed in 1942 as he Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, and has grown to become one of the most influentional and admired charities in the world.

Here at Justgiving we've been huge fans of Oxfam's innovative approach to fundraising and particularly its early adoption of new media technologies, so we're seriously excited to be working with them.

Check out Oxfam's website for some uber hip online offerings, including its Generation Why micro-site and a range of top notch blogs: the main Oxfam blog, the Summer Festivals blog and the Coldplay tour blog. Download choones from Oxfam Music and look no further than Oxfam Unwrapped for your Christmas shopping.

And of course, here on Justgiving you can donate to Oxfam or create a fundraising page to raise funds for any event or occasion.

Oxfam supporters have been wasting no time getting started, with two pages online already. Matt Roles is getting sponsored to shave his prodigious ginger beard, and then grow a new one. Ed Lyons, meanwhile, has created a page to collect donations instead of house-warming gifts for his friend Mark.

- James G

Welcome to Children in Need

A big welcome to our newest charity partner - Children in Need.

As everyone knows, tonight is the big night. You can help make this year's appeal the biggest ever by creating a fundraising page here or making a donation here.

Last year, the BBC Children in Need appeal raised more than £34 million to improve the lives of children and young people throughout the UK.

- James G

Justgiving scoops double Hitwise award!

For the second successive quarter, we've been awarded a Top 10 ranking against other UK websites in two Hitwise categories. Yay!

For the quarter ending September 2005, Justgiving ranked:

• No.3 by visits in the Community - Humanitarian category
  
  
• No.9 by visits in the Business and Finance - IT and Internet category

Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service (phew, that's a mouthful). Each quarter, it gives a Top Ten Award to the Top Ten websites across each industry it monitors.

So thank you everybody for making us a Top Ten site by using Justgiving so much!

- James G

October improvements

At the beginning of every month our techno bods stay up all night pushing buttons as a whole host of improvements to our site go live. They’re all looking a bit bleary eyed this morning, so that must mean the site’s had its monthly makeover.

Here’s what’s new this month:

1. Contacting your sponsors

Loads and loads and loads of you have contacted us to say you’d like a simple way to email all the people who donated to your fundraising page once your event is completed. And your wish is our command!

We’ve added a check box in the donation process so each person who sponsors you can opt-in to be contacted by you. If the donor ticks this box, their email address is visible to you on a new screen in the “See who has sponsored you” section of the “Page management” area of Your Account.

When your sponsors opt-in, their email addresses will automatically be added to your online address book within Your Account, and hey presto, you can easily send an email to them all to say thanks.

2. Making it easier to tell friends about your fundraising page

We’ve redesigned the screen you see when you’ve successfully completed building a fundraising page. Instead of the confusing email options, it now points you directly to your account. From there, you can quickly and easily send emails to promote your page.

3. Access to your page even when it’s expired

Once a fundraising page has expired, it used to be the case that you could no longer access it to see who sponsored you. That was rubbish, so we changed it, and now you can!

4. More email templates

We have created two additional email templates within your account area. Whereas previously you could only send a “please sponsor me” email, you can now send a “update on my progress” email, and one to say “thank you for sponsoring me”. Cool, huh?

Oh, and there’s loads of other stuff as well, but it was mostly boring complicated stuff, so suffice to say we hope it will make your life easier and your time on justgiving.com more enjoyable. Let us know what improvements we should make in November by emailing suggestions@justgiving.com.

Right, we’re all off for Jason’s birthday drinks. He’s 30 you know. Happy birthday Jase!

- James G

Welcome to the Justgiving Blog

Hello everyone –

Welcome to the Justgiving Blog!

We’re keen to keep you updated with all the exciting things that happen here at Justgiving HQ, so we’ve set up this blog where we can post news, views and other fun stuff on a regular basis.

You’ll be the first to know when we make improvements to the site, or when we release exciting new products invented by our team of technological wizards. We’ll flag up fundraising pages we like and share top tips to help you raise more money. And lots of other stuff like that.

We’ll also use the blog to introduce ourselves a bit better, so you’ll get to know us as well as our website.

Please leave us comments by clicking on the 'comments' link below. Let us know what you think of the blog, or tell us jokes, or give us recipes for nice cakes. Whatever you like.

- James G