Justgiving's blog

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

A Lesson in Blog Fundraising

I started my blog, Take Off Your Running Shoes, as a fundraising exercise. The idea is that I want to raise £100,000 for cancer research, but I really, really do not want to have to run a marathon in order to contribute…partly because I am pretty washed out by the run of non-stop cancer treatment I’ve been taking since June 2004.

As the blog started to pick up readers I came up with a formula. I said that if everybody who reads my blog contributes one pound a week for one year, then I’d reach my target really quickly. The total is running at about £32,000 currently. Mostly, I’ve been incredibly impressed at just how generous complete strangers are; people I’ve only met across the internet have been ready to contribute hundreds of pounds. It’s also a symptom of how much cancer there is around these days – we are living in the cancer age, and everybody knows somebody.

Some friends I’ve spoken to who have run marathons for breast cancer organisations and raised thousands of pounds told me that when they tried to find out where exactly their £7000 or £10,000 or whatever would be going, they were not given exact answers by the charities. I felt it was really important, for me and for my givers, that I know exactly where my hundred thousand pounds will be spent. I got a “shopping list” from Gordon Rustin, founder of the CTRT (where my money is going) - £38,000 for a research nurse, that sort of thing. I think that is another reason readers responded to my appeal – there’s no sense of this money being spent on PR or anything not directly medical.

Every time donations slow down – a bit like when you lose readers on your blog – I start to panic and try and think of new ways to stimulate traffic to my Justgiving page. Every time, we hit another round figure – 20,000, 30,000 and so on – I’m celebrating.

Dinablog: http://takeoffyourrunningshoes.typepad.com

Dina Rabinovitch is a writer and journalist (read her Guardian column here) and her book 'Take Off Your Party Dress' is available to order here.

Guest Blogger: Mark's Tip

I recently committed to take part next winter in what will be my fifth Ski Challenge for Scope. Here's my page.

I've been very successful over the years in raising funds for Scope across my various Justgiving pages. I hope very much that my momentum following my return from 'Colorado 2007' will keep going; I've already received £1,015 in donations!

Donor Fatigue

I'm very conscious, as I was last year, that I'm continuing to 'hit' the same people, year-on-year, to sponsor me. Thankfully, most are really happy to be supporting Scope, but what keeps my sponsors coming back is my self-fund principle. I pay for my trips myself and do not use any percentage of the money raised to subsidise my participation costs.

When there's a travel element to the event, it's really important to state this on your page directly. This is how I did it:

Don't forget that it's worth talking to your charity about payments in kind too. Policies may vary but sorting out the flights yourself can be accepted as part of the fundraising target. I've had flights donated to me in past that can count towards cost-offsetting; it may mean I'm not on the same plane as the rest of the group but it really makes fundraising a bit easier.

Best Wishes,

Mark

Got your own tips you'd like to share, or maybe you'd like to be a guest blogger too? Email me now!