Justgiving's blog

G is for...

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.

F is for...

The Flora London Marathon of course. 15,000 runners had Justgiving pages this year and have raised over £17m; a record-breaking year. Well done to all of them!

There's lots of fashion shows going on too, like Tara's Childline show that raised over £3,500 and Anne-Marie's event for Maggie's Centres. I think our favourite is the Fabulous Frocks Fashion show, organised by the Daughters of Destiny, because they satisfy Jonno's soft-spot for alliteration but also for coming up with such a great way of using Justgiving.

Lots of footballing action on JG. From mascots to players to fans, they're all there.

There's also a fair bit of fasting. Kaye and Alison deprived themselves of food to fundraise, something a few of us here would definitely struggle with.

Amazingly, you can even fundraise when you've gone fishing.

Finally, we're still in love with Flickr. Add us as contacts and track all the goings-on in and around JG Towers, as well as our increasing obsession with getting Moo cards printed. We love those guys.

Oh, and one more thing:

We love it (we're all on there). You love it (it's one of our biggest referrers). More on the powers of the mighty FB very soon.

E is for...

E is Easter. Yes it's been and gone this year, but in the midst of all that chocolate, bunnies and suggestive fertile imagery, there's fundraising going on too.

One of our favourite Easter appeals was from a chap called Marc. He asked his friends if they felt guilty gorging themselves on chocolate wrapped in extravagant flashy boxes and prompted them to donate the cost of an Egg to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal London Hospital. Inspired stuff.

E is also for Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Marathon is always big and only happened the other week. Carl embarked on 'the biggest challenge of his life' by taking part when only in October he was a long way away from being 'race fit'. Cris and Nancy ran for the MicroLoan Foundation and raised nearly £1500 this year.

Let's not forget the Edinburgh MoonWalk either. The London event was another roaring success but the Edinburgh Moonwalk takes place in a few short weeks. Joanna and the Silver Bullets team are nearly at their target, and Georgie and her team are nearly there too along with hundreds of others. Moonwalkers have raised more money online this year than ever before.

E is for Espanol. Thanks to Adriana's Great North Run page we now know that solo haz click donde dice is spanish for all you have to do is click where it says. Useful when on holiday. Roberto also educated us with por favor patrocineme en linea, which is the most important phrase of all: please sponsor me now.

Finally E is also for envelope stuffing. There's quite alot of it going on at JG Towers, mostly by the intrepid finance team. Here's a picture of lots and lots of Gift Aid claims:

We're never put off by our Gift Aid mountain. They get stuffed into envelopes and off they go.

One day we hope all the paper won't be necessary. Jonno's back with the big F-words soon.

D is for...

Doing good, as our American cousins would no doubt say.

D is for Dina Rabinovitch. Dina is a writer and journalist (with a Guardian column), JG fundraiser and blogger extraordinaire. She's even been nice enough to honour us with a guest blogger post, writing about her inspirational story.

Other favourite people at JG Towers include the daring Derrick De Mel and Ducati-driving* Dominic Lacey, developer and CTO par excellence. Find out more about them in our About Us section.

D is also for 'Double Death Valley' Run, one of the more extreme fundraising efforts we've seen. Mark Cockbain is the impressively mad person undertaking this challenge!

Other D-vents include Dogathons, like the immeasurably cute Hettie's sponsored walk and Echo's Colchester Dogathon

The same idea is taken to a slightly more bizarre extent with the Dogathong, created by the barking mad Paul Colville, where they will be walking dogs and wearing thongs. As you do.

A more traditional fundraising event is the Dragon Boat Race. There are always a few corporate teams who race for charities, like Young and Gault's and NHS 24, or regular racers like Matt Thompson's team.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous, we conclude with one of the most imaginative pages ever built on Justgiving: a round of applause to Daniel Waite and his fundraising page, where he is raising money by Doing Nothing.

*He actually drives a Honda, but that doesn't alliterate

C is for...

Cutting straight to the chase:

C is for Clerkenwell. Our physical and spiritual home. We've just moved to St Cross street, sandwiched between Leather Lane and Hatton Garden. We really like it, check out photos of our place here.

It's also for Christmas. Not content with secret santa, dodgy office parties and goodwill to all men, much festive fundraising takes place during December. There are special Christmas appeals both at home and abroad. Not forgetting those lovely Christmas concerts that happen too.

Slightly more timely for May is Cricket. We always look forward to the first Test, but lots of JGers get their willow out for charity, including some big companies and matched donations. And don't forget about the Lord's Taverners!

That leads us nicely into companies. Corporate fundraising is big on JG. They're all on there, from the biggest banks and consulting types, to telecoms, media groups, engineers, law firms, supermarkets, people who make bar snacks, IT and technology groups and global brands. Actually we reckon there are more lawyers than anyone else right now. Tom wants to know if JG's working well for companies right now, so drop him a line if you've had any experience doing corporate fundraising through our site so we can make it better.

C is also for the Cannonball Run. Our logo is going on some posh cars for this year's event and we can't wait!

Finally, don't forget the Cutty Sark. Help the restoration appeal right here.

Missed A and B? A-Z has it's own category here.

B is for...

After Simon's astounding announcement of our alphabetic adventure last week, it's time to move on to more bizarre, but brilliant, bits and bobs that make up the JG: A - Z   (Ed - enough with the alliteration already!)

Today brings us examples of the letter B:

B is for the BBC. Yes, Auntie's workers have been great users of the Justgiving site over the years, with many of their most famous names (and shows - see A for Apprentice) appearing on our very own site.

From Evan Davis to Adrian Chiles, Commentator to Eastender (Ian Beale, Carly and Dawn), Editors to Cameramen to Presenters, they've all been at it.

The most famous of all is of course the "get well soon" page for Richard Hammond, which raised the most money of any fundraising page in the history of Justgiving - a staggering £190,000 (see the whole story here)

From the BBC we move to Channel 4, as B is also for Big Brother. It seems a lot of the contestants fly straight from Davina's questions to a PC and create a fundraising page: Jade's, er, memorable Marathon effort had a page here, as did Kinga and Michelle Bass.

Never to be outdone, Aisleyene even gave up smoking for charity, and Rula Lenska went on a Trek to India (to swap CBB stories with Shilpa perhaps?).

No self-respecting fundraising list could ignore the humble Baked Bean, and there's been countless examples of bean-based-fundraising on Justgiving: especially the world famous Captain Beanie (here with some bemused members of JG in 2006).

His current page is for a  Beans-on-toast-athon but he's also done the Flora London Marathon in 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2007! What a guy.

B is finally for Birthdays: we see more and more people ask for donations instead of presents, and two famous fan based examples are for Alan Rickman and Dan Radcliffe (who had another too).

But for us mere mortals, inspiration can be found with Oli Lewington who asked readers of his blog to donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust instead of giving presents. And we musn't forget the amazing Cecily, who we loved so much, she got her own blog post.

A is for...

Today's blog post is brought to you by the colour green, number 18 and letter A.

Jonno and I are going to tag-team the official Justgiving A-Z. It's an index of great fundraising ideas, interesting stuff from the website itself and a commentary on other things that make us tick. A bit like those '100 best' compilation shows on Channel 4, but minus the C-list celebrity soundbites and four hour running time.

So let's start at the beginning with the letter A:

A is for the Apprentice. Many Brentwood wannabes have fundraised through JG, including series one winner Tim Campbell, season two winner Michelle and current Amstrad hopeful Naomi. Even Sir Alan's aide Margaret has visited JG towers. We love it.

It's also for aerobics. We're often struggling to get down the gym, but there's loads of JG users who've stepped up with aerobathons, like Anne here, Judy and staff from Vie, our new local gym in Clerkenwell.

Don't forget abseiling either. Plenty of JGers like flinging themselves down a mountain / building / submarine (!) attached to a length of lightly reinforced string, all to raise funds for amazing causes.

Jonno's back with the killer B's next week.