2008 May « The Justgiving Blog

Archive for May, 2008

Charity account refresh

May 30, 2008 at 10:16 am · Filed under Service updates ·Tagged Justgiving charity account

Yesterday, we released quite a few text updates to the Charity Account to make it easier to use. We’d had feedback that a lot of the different areas were not as clear as they could be, plus we’ve re-vamped the whole "Marketing resources" section and re-named it Fundraising resources:

You’ll notice when you log-in that it’s not just the name of the section that’s changed, there’s now a Help and training section where you can find out about webinars, our welcome pack and here – the blog!

Plus, we’ve added a very helpful bit to the Buttons and logos section, so that when you click on the button you want, it gives you the html code you can use on your website that will link to your charity’s area on Justgiving:

So if I copy that code (from logging-in as the Demo Charity) into the blog here, I get this:

Clever, huh!

Here’s the new-look Fundraising & donations section, where you can create reports on fundraising pages, direct donations and edit thank-you messages:

Plus, there’s a re-written Account management area, where you can add new users, change your email address…

…and subscribe to our email alerts, or to our fantastic newsletter:

To see all the new changes though, it’s best just to have a look round yourself – there are lots of little things you may notice have been re-written or updated, but it would be a very dull blog post that listed them all…

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Vrrrrrroooooom

May 30, 2008 at 10:12 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Driving 3,000 miles across Europe over six days, stunning scenery, winding roads, wild parties… it’s the Cannonball Run Europe 2008 of course!

This year’s event runs from 6 – 12th July and looks like a lot of fun. We’ve just found the first of the Cannonballers’ fundraising pages – check them out:

www.justgiving.com/cb4kids

www.justgiving.com/davidward1

Or make your own fundraising page here!

Let us know if you’ve got a page for this event and we’ll add it here…

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Payment reports have changed

May 29, 2008 at 12:00 pm · Filed under Service updates

***Update 5th June – get help on formatting payment reports here***

As we announced last week, the way payment reports are generated has now changed – they are generated much faster, but without column selection and renaming features.

To help you out, we’ve produced demo reports for both donation and Gift Aid payments that you can download below, as well as all the field definitions:

Download justgiving_payment_reports.xls

We’ve also commissioned an external developer to replicate the column selection and renaming features we no longer support in a custom Excel file. We hoped that this would be ready today, but we’ve not finished testing it, so it should be released in the next few days.

Look out for announcements here, and in the Charity Account about that update, as we hope to have something we can give you that will help with the change.

We had to make this change to speed up report generation and improve the site’s performance, but we are trying to give you something that will replicate the loss of functionality and help you manage your reports.

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Ian Walker Challenge

May 28, 2008 at 2:59 pm · Filed under Inspirational fundraising

Here’s a fundraising page that caught our eye recently.

Mark Walker is raising money for Brake, in memory of his brother Ian, and he’s just completed a coast-to-coast mountain bike ride with a team of friends which he’s been blogging about here.

We’re impressed by their persistent work to keep Ian Walker’s memory alive and by the amount of progress they’ve made towards a pretty hefty target. Mark also managed to find a handy way for supporters to track their progress along the route.

When we contacted Mark yesterday, he said:

I am absolutely delighted that we have completed the challenge, something which I am very proud to put my brother’s name on. The Justgiving page has been an ideal portal for receiving donations but we did receive the odd complaint that the website, for one reason or another, would not accept donations, but other than that it has been absolutely ideal and painless.

We’re so sorry that some of you have had trouble donating lately. We know the site’s been slower than usual because of heavier traffic and charities’ end of year reporting and we’re in the process of moving to some new, faster servers to solve the problem. In the meantime, if you’re in any doubt as to whether we’ve processed your donation, please contact our helpdesk at help@justgiving.net

Congratulations Mark and the Minorplanet team for making it to the end of a tough challenge!

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Payment reports are changing…

May 22, 2008 at 6:13 pm · Filed under Service updates

***Update 5th June – get help on formatting the reports here***

*Update 29th May – the reports have now changed – read more*

As a lot of you will know, we’ve not provided the best of service for payment reports over the last couple of months. They have been available again for over a month, we’ve said sorry, and now we’re trying to make them better again.

Reports will soon be much quicker to generate

So that’s good news for those of you who spend a lot of time staring at the Justgiving dog and the dove of data…(trust me, we do know how you feel).

Is there a catch?

Unfortunately, yes. To enable us to generate these reports quicker, and to minimise any effect they may have on the site in general, from Thursday 29th May, you will no longer be able to customise the reports before you generate them.

That means no column selections and no column renaming.

You will only be able to download a report in Excel and CSV with every column selected (apart from two that will no longer be included)*. Just like the ones below:

Download example_donation_payment_report.xls

**UPDATE 28th May – we now have a Gift Aid report example too**

(The Gift Aid report no longer includes a “message from donor” column, and the “Net Donation minus Estimated VAT” column [BS] has been changed to “Net Gift Aid minus Estimated VAT” so you can add up that column and it will give you the approximate total paid to your charity.)

Download example_gift_aid_payment_report.xls

We know that this is going to make some of your lives a bit harder again. So we’re trying our best to build something that will replicate the custom functionality in Excel, because this change is going to happen soon…

Since it is *urgent* for us to implement this to ease the strain on our servers from so many reports and ensure we don’t have to turn them off, all reports will come like this from Thursday 29th May.

As I said, we are working every day to try and find/build another way of providing the same functionality, and we’ll keep you updated on this.

The technical reason

Up to now, we have allowed you to customise the reports to include any number of columns, and column names. This meant that every report was generated on the fly – searching the database for all the info from those select columns.

Now that we will give you a fixed report, we can index the database so that it accesses the information much quicker – more than 50% quicker, in fact.

Are we providing any help?

As above, we’re trying as best we can to minimise the work that you will need to do, so watch out for some webinars, videos and help sheets in the next week…

More info on our finance processes can be found here.

*the two columns that will no longer appear in this report are “Gift Aid Payment Reference” and “Gift Aid Payment Reference Date”, normally columns BR and BS. They have been taken out as they meant the reports were much slower to download – and since they would only include data 6-8 weeks after a payment report (when Gift Aid is repaid) we thought they were not essential.

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