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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
Alex said
Congratulations… I guess that’s where a dose of practical functionality and the wide net of applying to multiple charities leads to success! Keep up the good work.
Jonathan Waddingham said
Thanks for your comment Alex, glad you think so – and nice of you to say so
Howard Lake said
It’s especially encouraging to hear this because Justgiving has been flagging up this trend for a good few months now, indicating the growing importance for charities of testing out Facebook and similar sites. It’s exciting to see your expectations borne out.
Jonathan Waddingham said
Howard, yes, it’s an interesting trend and one that appears to be continuing – so many people are changing the way they interact online that’s it vitally important that people (or charities) who want to be heard have a presence wherever those conversations are taking place.
Sarah West said
It really is interesting to see this increase in referrals from Facebook. I however have been finding it quite difficult to add Justgiving links to our charities group facebook page. do you have any tips?
sarah
Jonathan Waddingham said
Hi Sarah, what you could do on your FB group page is put up some posted items of the links to your charity on Justgiving, like http://www.justgiving.com/cpre
As for the fan page, our application pre-dates them, so it can’t be added to them alas.
What you can do, though, is add an RSS feed application to your fan page and add the RSS feed from fundraising pages on JG to appear on it – here’s how it looks on our fan page:
http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/justgiving/6333166373?ref=s
Hope that helps!
Kathy O'Neill said
Is it possible to send invites out for the just giving application? I have added it to one of my friends profiles but it means people only know about it, if they actually check out her profile.
Thanks Kathy
Jonathan Waddingham said
Hi Kathy, at present it’s not possible to send invites out using the application.
What most people do is send a message to their friends in the usual Facebook manner including a link to a fundraising page and the application.
Once you add the application, it would (depending on your preferences) appear in friend’s mini feeds saying you’d done that, so it would still make others aware (again, depending on their mini feed preferences).
I admit, it’s not the best way to do it at the moment, but we will be looking to improve that in due course.
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