January | 2008 | The Justgiving Blog

Archive for January, 2008

Charity site of the month

January 28, 2008 at 10:39 am · Filed under Charity Site of the Month ·Tagged Moo

OK, so it’s not really a charity website per se. But it is a website that can help charities and people raising money for charities…

www.moo.com/justgiving

And yes, they are our new friends, but let me explain what this means: for years people have been asking for a way to print off their Justgiving web address (url) so they can give it people in the *real world*.

Well, now we’ve teamed up with Moo, printing stuff is incredibly easy to do, hugely customisable (you can have 100 different images for 100 cards) and cheap to boot – be they MiniCards, Postcards, NoteCards or Greeting cards!

You see, Moo love to print, and we love to help people raise money online. Here’s what the two look like together (thanks to Francis):

So, now you can encourage your fundraisers to use Moo cards as well as email to promote their pages. Or why not even create some business cards for your charity? We use Moo for that and it rocks!

Think about it, you use DM, you know how that works. This is über Direct Marketing, where your fundraisers are handing out marketing to people, giving them a call to action face-to-face and asking them to donate.

And do you remember the Help the Hospices PDF about how to get the most of Justgiving?
Download making_the_best_of_justgiving_by_helpthe_hospices.pdf

All that needs now is a line that says "Print out your web address on cards to give to people using Moo at www.moo.com/justgiving" and Robert is your mother’s brother.

But you won’t really appreciate the sheer cuteness and cool-ness of Moo until you get some yourself…

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Best Practice Webinar Recording

January 25, 2008 at 3:42 pm · Filed under In the News ·Tagged webinars

In September and October last year, we ran a series of 14 Justgiving best practice webinars for all charities on the site. This series was attended by a whopping 158 people from over 100 different charities, but we never got round to making a recording at the time for various tech reasons.

Until now, that is! Yes, with the addition of a couple of very clever software tools, you can now watch a recording of this very popular and well-received webinar at your own convenience, 24/7!

There’s a sneak peek below of what’s in store, but I recommend you go here
and watch it in full screen to fully appreciate the "very slick and
interesting" webinar full of "useful tips on how we can promote just
giving to our supporters" not to mention the "light breezy
presentation"

Oh, and don’t forget the notes (and PDFs) that go with it…

Download best_practice_webinar_info_pack_091007.doc

Download making_the_best_of_justgiving_by_helpthe_hospices.pdf

Download justgiving_instructions.pdf

Justgiving Best Practice Webinar from Jonathan @ JG on Vimeo.

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Our New Friends

January 25, 2008 at 12:01 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

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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.

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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

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Donation reminder & new Gift Aid questions

January 24, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Service updates ·Tagged gift aid

Way back in the mists of time, people used to be able to make ‘pledges’ on Justgiving. This meant they could enter their card details and we’d only process them after someone had completed their event.

We had to stop doing this due to card processing security reasons, but we’ve now introduced a reminder feature on fundraising pages, so sponsors can add a reminder to their calendar – it appears under the thermometer on all fundraising pages that are based around an event date (like this one).

Just click on the Set Reminder link and you’re given the option to add a ‘donation meeting’ to your calendar, so you’ll be prompted on the event date to make a donation to the page. So, if people are a bit short of cash, they can write an ‘I Owe You’ to self and sponsor their friend at a later date.

New Gift Aid questions

We love Gift Aid. It’s a brilliant way to make donations go further and we reclaim it automatically on your behalf. But it ain’t half complicated (some would even say taxing)!

Some donors still get confused by it every so often [and we hate having confused users ] so we’ve simplified the process again to make it clearer for users. But even the simplification of this is kind of tricky to explain, so I’ve made a video:

New Gift Aid Questions on JG from Jonathan @ JG on Vimeo.

Yes, that was probably the most exciting video you’ve ever seen on the interweb…

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New homepage

January 23, 2008 at 12:43 pm · Filed under In the News

If you’ve been to www.justgiving.com today you’ll have noticed that it’s a bit different:

Yes, we’ve added a few new things, plus a bit of spit and polish, to update the site for 2008.

So what’s new?

The first thing you’ll see is that we’ve added an overview of fundraising on the site (in the top right) to show how many people have used the site to raise money for you, the charities, on Justgiving. This is updated every night and helps put people at ease that they can feel confident doing the same thing.

THE most important button on the site (start fundraising now) has been moved to the left to make it more prominent, but it’s in the right box is where things get interesting!

We’re promoting the London Marathon and New Year resolution pages at the top and then we show pictures from real fundraising pages showing how much they’ve raised and for whom.

As for how the pages are selected, every night we pull a random selection of 50 pages that meet certain criteria: a page with a user-uploaded page image, a page that has raised over £100 and a page that is not an In Memoriam page.

The idea behind this is that it gives more visibility to the things people are doing on the site, it encourages people to upload their own images, and by only including pages with donations, it is supposed to give examples of how easy it is to raise money on the site.

Every time you refresh the page, you’ll see the images change from one of those random 50 pages.

The sponsor a friend search is still there, as is (of course!) the charity search as below:

You’ll no doubt notice that we’ve added a new footer to every page on Justgiving that gives all the info anyone would need (especially a new link to the charities blog – yay!).

And, one thing you might not have noticed is that the site has been centred – so now people can print fundraising pages without having to set their print settings to landscape – a small, but helpful change.

But, as ever, we’d love to hear your feedback, so leave a comment below and tell us what you think (good or bad)…

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