Archive for March, 2007

Justgrievesy.com

March 30, 2007 at 5:26 pm · Filed under Our News ·Tagged , , , ,

It’s only bloomin’ Friday and at JG towers with a tearful snuffle, we will soon be losing a talisman that has kept this machine well oiled. Our little Greivsy with his fantastic wit and charm (steady now girls…) will be missed, but never the less he’ll be seeing us regularly of that I have no doubt. All of us want to wish him a very well time in the world of show biz and let him know just how much he means to us.

In other news… we’ve had a very busy week and also are planning towards are part in the Flora London Marathon Expo which will be held at the fabulous Excel Centre (in the Dockyards) at London. To add to this, we’ve set up a Justgiving Facebook group for the event! There, you can upload your pictures from the event, talk to other members about it, post your Justgiving page to us and much more. So why not have a look at the site and give it a go! Inside of Justgiving, there has been much talk about what we’ll be wearing for th e duration of the event and sadly the waist coats I envisaged everyone wearing are off Coatthe list.

Just to add to my woe, in an episode of Ugly Betty the brilliant colours of JG were in action in the precise way I imagined. So despite the face we’re missing out on a fashion catwalk style it won’t hold us back from blogging about the event and getting some of you lovely people on video for our Youtube site. Have a great weekend!

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The Guinness Pint Training

March 29, 2007 at 11:38 am · Filed under Inspirational fundraising

Ever wondered what a pint of Guinness looks like in training?

Wonder no longer:

Thanks to Antonio for sending this in!

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Nearly five and a half years ago…

March 28, 2007 at 4:16 pm · Filed under Our News

Nearly five and a half years ago someone failed to show for an interview at JG towers. After a phone callGrievseandcaro
that woke him up, and a very quick-thinking excuse about problems on the train, James Grieve turned up looking a little bedraggled and charmed Anne-Marie and Caroline into offering him a six-month position covering Caroline’s maternity leave.

Fast forward to March 2007 and James and Caroline are both still here – having job-shared, worked part-time, full-time and not at all at various times in the intervening years. Zarine’s neverending patience paid off as James has done some amazing stuff since joining JG – copywriting, marketing, creative stuff, building the blog, helpdesk, sales and more.

He’s also pursued his ‘other’ career of being a theatre director, spending summers soaking up the wind and rain at the Edinburgh festival, and Caroline had the opportunity to spend valuable time with her family.

But today is potentially the last day of a great collaboration as James prepares to head to the National Theatre at Easter and Caroline gets ready to leave London in the summer. Unless James comes back – again – before July, it’s the end of an era for two of our oldest JGers. Here’s to job-sharing – and a great reason why you shouldn’t turn down the offer of six months work…

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Charity Website of the Month!

March 28, 2007 at 2:45 pm · Filed under Charity Site of the Month ·Tagged ,

During my time at Justgiving, I’ve visited a lot of charity websites (over a thousand in my first two weeks alone!) so I think I have a decent idea of what’s good and, er, less good.

I thought it would be only proper to share my experiences and to present some of the better examples, hence starting a charity website of the month feature:

And without further ado, I’m pleased to announce that the inaugural winner is…(drum roll please) the Dotty Rhino website!
Dotty_rhino
When you visit www.dottyrhino.co.uk you are presented with an animated scene from Mkomazi, an area in Northern Tanzania.

It features many of the residents of the area (both human and non-human) who talk when you hover the mouse over them – I dare anyone to listen to them and not smile – it even made Zarine laugh! My personal favourite is Dave the Dung Beetle: will he ever get to where he’s going, the busy chap?

The “Dotty Dogma” states that “Our website has been created for an imaginative and considerate audience, and aims to be both educational and fun”.

I think it’s safe to say it ticks both those boxes, and you can keep up to date with them on their blog.

If the quality of their site makes you want to support them, the style is also mirrored in a rather fancy donation page created by our designer Kai (good work son):

Dotty2

And if you’re really curious about who Dotty is, have a look at one of their previous blog posts that lists “Five things you don’t know about me”. One of these is, “We rhino are actually the only mammals who have horns on our noses not on our heads… how special are we?!”

Could be a contender for the Famous Friday Fact…

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Creating donor evangelists?

March 27, 2007 at 5:48 pm · Filed under How fundraisers use Justgiving ·Tagged , , ,

I’ve just read one of the recent posts from the excellent Donor Power Blog entitled, Want your donors to do your marketing for you? that started:

Wouldn’t you just love to have an army of donor-evangelists who are so dedicated to your organization that they not only give to you, but also find and motivate others to give?

This made me think of Simon’s recent post on our fundraiser blog about the spread of widgets. It features the story of the current top fundraiser for the Clatterbridge Cancer Campaign on the Justgiving website.

The page creators, Natalya Jagger and Andrew McGill, have their own website at http://www.rosemcgill.co.uk/ that gives more information about their fundraising, and the key thing is how they have motivated many other bloggers to feature the "widget" for their fundraising page.

As Simon showed, they have a page that holds all the code required to promote their page:

Rosemcgill_3

Anyone who visits their site is presented with an easy way of "spreading the word" for their cause when they click on the "help us" link. And as Natalya told Simon, "At the moment we have around 30-40 blogs and websites that show the widget for us."

The average Justgiving fundraiser emails their link to around 30 people, but the net tends to end there. With the example above, however, you can see how the reach of one page can be expanded from the contacts of one person to the contacts of all their contacts and so on.

Is this donor evangelism in action?

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