Archive for July, 2008

Reminder – payment reports change on 8th August

July 31, 2008 at 10:11 am · Filed under Service updates

As we announced in June, payment reports will be scheduled from Friday 8th August. We will be making payments as normal on Fridays, and the summary of how much has been paid will be available in the Charity Account too.

The detailed reports will then be generated by our systems over the weekend and you’ll be able to download them from Wednesday 13th August.

This will then be the case for all subsequent reports – payments as normal on a Friday (as long as £100 has been donated that week, else we pay monthly) with a summary of how much has been paid, followed by the detailed information the following Wednesday.

You’ll then be able to use our payment report reformatter to help manage the data.

Things to note

  • Initially, this will only be the case for donation payment reports, not Gift Aid payments
  • Old reports will still be generated “on the fly” (processed by our servers in real time)

Thanks to the transition to a new payment processing partner this week, the card fees charged will be lower for donations made from last Thursday (the time we actually moved to our processing partner).

Also, because the reports will be pre-generated and you only need to download them, you won’t be seeing much of the Justgiving dog (or the data retriever) and the “dove of data”…

Doganddove

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Justgiving’s new processing partner – lower fees, better reliability and scalability

July 29, 2008 at 6:22 pm · Filed under Service updates ·Tagged

Justgiving has a new payment processing partner. From now on, all donations made through our site will be processed by RBS Lynk Inc (RBS) through their Bibit platform.

What does this mean?

Lower card charges on every donation:

•    Credit cards (Visa/Mastercard) = 1.34% (Mastercard was 1.4%)
•    Debit cards (Switch/Maestro/Solo) = 22p per donation
•    Visa Delta/Visa Electron = 22p per donation (was 23p)

These are amazingly low rates, and are due to the volume of transactions made on Justgiving. Here’s what they used to be.

More reliable, more scalable and faster

We’ve joined one of the largest payment card processing service providers in Europe and we are one of their top clients globally, in terms of volume.

That means we’re confident that they can handle the massive volumes of donations we process in the busiest times (we were processing 100 donations a minute the Friday before the last London Marathon). Already, donations are being processed over twice as fast.

Oh, and we join a little-known (just the five billion songs downloaded) online music retailer in using this service, as well as an extremely popular travel website. So it’s a very reliable platform that will scale as we continue to grow.

No more Verified by VISA (VBV) or MasterCard SecureCode (MCSC) on Justgiving for now [except for Maestro cards where it's compulsory]

We first introduced VBV and MCSC back in October 2006 as an early adopter of what was supposed to become a web standard for more secure card processing online. It turns out that it hasn’t become web standard. Yet.

We found that people donating through our site were not aware of these services, sometimes even thinking they were a phishing scam, when in fact it was extra security! We put our donor/fundraiser helpdesk number (0845 021 2110) up on the pages where VBV or MCSC appeared so people could call us if they were unsure, but we had no control over the content or appearance of that page.

We monitored the number of people who started making a donation and went on to finish the process, and found it decreased when VBV and MCSC were switched on.

Taking VBV and MCSC off meant we were charged more

We switched off VBV and MCSC at the end of last year to encourage more people to finish the donation process and increase the volume of donations to charities. But this meant we were charged higher processing charges for every donation.

We didn’t pass that charge on to charities. We took the view that we didn’t want to increase our fees and have less money go to them. So we took the hit. What did that mean to us?

A £350,000 loss.

So we are happy that we won’t have to have them on the site for the foreseeable future (and that our Chief Financial Office can finally sleep soundly again).

Don’t worry, we’re still totally secure

We’ve been PCI compliant (Level 2) for over a year. As we said then, “we can now provide VISA-certified assurances to any enquiries about the security of our users’ credit card and personal data.”

We are not saying that either the VBV or MCSC schemes are in any way insecure – it is just that most people do not know what they are and are baffled when they come across them.

What’s next…

We’re excited about our new partnership with RBS, and confident that charities on Justgiving will benefit a lot from this move.

It’s been an intense 6-week project for our development team, powered by a mountain of takeaway pizzas and sugary concoctions – but this is just the first step of our move to RBS and part of a massive program of investment in a new platform and product culminating in a complete overhaul of the site by the end of the year…

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Facebook referrals to Justgiving are bigger than Google

July 25, 2008 at 1:11 pm · Filed under In the News ·Tagged , , ,

Coupled with yesterday’s widget birthday, it’s also one year since we released our Facebook application for use by its 8.5 million users in the UK.

The Justgiving Facebook app can be seen at http://apps.new.facebook.com/justgiving and it allows people to promote their Justgiving fundraising pages on Facebook. It shows an update of how much money has been raised and the last five donations:
Bobby_robson_fb_app

We released the first UK fundraising application soon after
the Facebook application platform was announced and it has proved extremely popular over the last 12 months…

Facebook – it’s bigger than Google (for us)

It’s not only from our application that people come to Justgiving from Facebook – over the last year, Facebook has grown to be the biggest referrer to Justgiving – with 1,327,288 referrals (number of times someone has come to Justgiving from Facebook).

Here’s the number of Facebook referrals over the last year compared with google.co.uk and google.com:

Webab_graph

You can see that February 2008 was the first time Facebook overtook Google, up to a peak in April when Facebook accounted for 50% more than Google. This is obviously due to the London Marathon taking place at that time, and shows how many people were using Facebook to promote their online fundraising.

How popular is the Justgiving Facebook application?

The Justgiving Facebook application at its peak had been installed 106,150 times.

That makes an average of 290 installs a day, or 12 every hour since it was released.

See for yourself on the adonomics site
- although the numbers have gone down in the last few days as the new
Facebook interface appears to make it harder to promote your favourite
applications :-(

**Update 29th July – we’re back up to 107,200 – clearly something odd went on!**

What percentage of traffic to Justgiving comes from Facebook?

If we take another graph back even further, to January 2007, and look at the percentage of referrals to Justgiving, it’s very clear how quickly the online landscape has changed (as previously referred to by Hitwise) – Facebook has grown extremely quickly into a preferred means of fundraising communications for UK users:

Webab_graph2

At it’s peak one in five people who came to Justgiving, came from Facebook.

What’s also really interesting, is what areas on Facebook people are coming to Justgiving from:

Fb_referrers_to_jg_2

People’s profiles are clearly the most popular (due in large part to the application) but it’s interesting that the next biggest referrer is groups – I’ve been invited to loads of groups created by my friends where they promote their fundraising activity and Justgiving page.

This clearly works very well, and also builds a mini community of fundraiser and supporters in one place. And that’s one of the things that the internet is amazing at – enabling you to communicate and create a community with your friends and family to support you raising money and awareness for the causes you care about.

Think Facebook is marginal when it comes to fundraising online? You’d best think again.

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Happy Birthday to the Justgiving Widget

July 24, 2008 at 6:40 pm · Filed under In the News ·Tagged ,

Today is a day of celebrations at JG Towers as we celebrate the one year birthday of the Justgiving widget!

If you’re not sure (or can’t remember) what they are, it’s basically a mini version of a fundraising page that can be posted almost anywhere on the web – fundraising progress is automatically updated and it shows the three most recent donor comments. Click on “share this page” on any fundraising page to find out how to add one.

And here’s a screenshot of one at www.qhotels.co.uk/hikinghoteliers

Qhotels

Old_widget A quick history lesson

Justgiving was the first service to offer a UK fundraising widget powered by an RSS feed back in January 2007 (the old widget, left), prior to this flash version being released on July 24th last year.

Now for some stats…

It’s quite hard to get some accurate stats for how many new widgets are out there, but the old widget has generated a whopping 6,895,915 page impressions over the last 12 months.

The high number is mainly due to widgets being posted on a few high traffic sites like two (over here and over there) very popular sites for fans of Jonas Armstrong (!). But in that time, there have been nearly 20,000 old widgets out in the wild, and we estimate that there are many more new widgets.

**Update 25th July – the pages on Justgiving where people access the widget code have been viewed well over 40,000 times, and it’s fair to say that a large proportion of them actually used the widget – which is then seen by thousands more (the Dan Radcliffe fan site is one of our top referrers because of the widget there).**

Taking the percentage of page impressions due to the old widget over the past year and applying it to last week for the new widget, we reckon that widgets were on web pages viewed around 150,000 times in the last week.

What we can’t track (yet)

How many donations have come via widgets. This would be great to know, but it’s hard enough to track (reliably) the number of widgets on the web and how many times they are being seen as it is. That’s one for widget 3.0 I’m afraid…

It was a real birthday, we even made bought a cake

Yes, to celebrate this birthday, myself and our analyst John, mixed two of our favourite things (the internet & cake) to make this lovely widget cake -  or *widgecake* as we have coined it:

Cake_with_john_2

Now that’s what I call an RSS feed [groan].

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New Facebook Profile Instructions

July 23, 2008 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Whoa. Facebook’s all changed and stuff.

Unless you’ve been following the new profile updates then you’re probably either loving or hating the new boxy layout. We’re pretty split here at JG, but the most important question which has been asked today by you lovely people is: how do I get the JG application in the right place?

Well, our knight in shiny social armour for this is Jon B, who emailed us a set of instructions last night:

- click the applications tab at the top of the page 
- click the justgiving logo which will take you to a full page dedicated to the justgiving application which looks very good may i add [sic] (crikey thanks Jon)
- then click the applications tab again and it has an option to bookmark justgiving   
- this brings up a new window where you can then tick the box to add to profile

hope this helps,

keep up the good work.

So there you have it, a quick and easy way to get your fundraising progress back to its rightful place on your profile. Nice one Jon.

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