The Justgiving Blog

This month, we made the ‘sponsor a friend’ search box on our home
page a little bit smarter. Until now, our search facility only returned
Online Fundraising Pages that had been created through our
plain-vanilla Justgiving site. In other words, you could only find
pages looking like this.

This meant that, if you were visiting our home page to find a
fundraising page created via a charity’s branded microsite, such as Marie Curie Cancer Care’s for
example, the search would not return any meaningful results. Both our
charity members and our individual users were baffled by this, and
rightly so, so we went back to the drawing board and changed the logic
of our search.

You can now find any Justgiving fundraising page
via the ‘sponsor a friend’ search on our home page, regardless of where
they were initially created. Take a look for yourself. For instance, if
you search for ‘Angus Robb’ on our home page, you’ll find Angus’s page,
which was created on Marie Curie’s branded site and clearly displays
Marie Curie’s design and colours.

Likewise, when you search for a fundraising page on Marie Curie’s
microsite, you can now find all the pages built in aid of the charity,
not just those that were created via the main Justgiving site.

All this is designed to help people find their friend’s page as
easily and quickly as possible. As Justgiving continues to grow as an
online destination for all charity supporters, it made no sense to
maintain artificial barriers between the various sites that we power.
Thank you to all of you who gave us your (very persistent!) feedback on
this. What you asked for made perfect sense, and we hope you are
pleased with the results.

If you have any further feedback or suggestions about searches, or any other aspect of our service, please email us.

The Asian Tsunami brought the issue of earmarking of funds on the
Justgiving site into sharp focus. Many people created Justgiving
fundraising pages in aid of the victims of the disaster, largely
without the prior knowledge of the charities concerned, and questions
were raised from both parties about the correct allocation of these
funds.  New pages are created every day in which people campaign for a
particular cause or appeal, effectively placing an obligation on the
charity to allocate the money raised to that particular purpose.

This is why we have amended our terms and conditions to make it
clear to our individual users that their chosen recipient charity
reserves the right to use the funds raised through our site for its
general purposes, not a particular appeal. Charities can of course
choose to ‘earmark’ some funds raised through a particular fundraising
page to a specific appeal if it so chooses, but this general rule
resolves the confusion surrounding this issue.

This information is available to our users in our terms and
conditions (which can be found via a link on the bottom of each page on
www.justgiving.com). It is also
brought to the attention of those who are building a fundraising page.
If in doubt, they are invited to call the charity for further
information.

Is earmarking a concern for your charity? If you are a charity supporter, do you have view on this issue? Please email us & let us know your thoughts.