Twitter, Justgiving and fundraising – an introduction

March 6, 2009 at 5:40 pm · Filed under How fundraisers use Justgiving, In the News, Justgiving for Charities ·Tagged Fundraising, Justgiving, twitter

Twitter. It’s the website everyone’s talking about at the moment, with mass media falling over themselves to feature it, explain what it is and jump to be part of it. Sky News have even appointed a Twitter correspondent, and the Queen is apparently going to be ‘tweeting‘ (as they call it).

According to Hitwise, Twitter has recently entered the top 100 most popular websites in the UK and its traffic is growing exponentially. But what about fundraising on the site, and how are Twitter users using Justgiving?

First off, what is Twitter?

At its simplest, Twitter is a way of sharing short messages (of up to 140 characters) with anyone who wants to hear what you say, and following people (or brands) you’re interested in and read what they say. There are literally millions of articles on the web if you want to find out more.

How many people use Twitter and Justgiving?

As a source of traffic to the Justgiving site as a whole, it’s still marginal, despite a marked increase in the last 3 months:

From the beginning of January to March 5th, Twitter only counts for 0.6% of all referrers to Justgiving, lagging way behind the two biggest, Facebook (28%) and Google (22%). It is interesting to note that there is a quite high bounce rate to referrals from Twitter (i.e. people who come to the site and then leave straight away) and that there’s a high number of new visits. This might suggest that the twitter audience is not a particularly engaged audience (although that depends entirely on who’s doing the asking and to whom), but it does look like it’s reaching a new audience.

These stats could be misleading, however, as many people who use Twitter don’t actually access it from the Twitter website, and use desktop applications like Twhirl or Tweetdeck to manage their Twitter feed. If someone clicks on a link to Justgiving using an application like that, it doesn’t count as a referral from Twitter.com, so there are probably a lot more visits to Justgiving from Twitter than these stats show.

If you search for mentions of Justgiving on Twitter (using Twitter search) you can see there are a loads of people sharing their fundraising pages – and we’d predict that to grow as the London Marathon approaches and more and more people start using Twitter.

Using Twitter and Justgiving

Here’s an of example of sharing a Justgiving link on Twitter from Ian Hislop:

The first time we saw a decent number of Justgiving mentions on Twitter was in December, when web design legend Paul Boag promoted his agency’s Christmas Appeal on their podcast and through Twitter. You can see that many of the donors left their Twitter username on the fundraising page (Twitter convention states that you put an @ before your username to communicate with other users):

A great ongoing example of this is the twitchhiker, who’s raising money for charity:water by trying to travel as far as he can for 30 days, relying only on the goodwill of people on Twitter. He’s raised over £2,000 already, and most of the donations on his fundraising page include people’s Twitter usernames:

Even if our analytics don’t show a huge spike in traffic from Twitter, the evidence suggests more and more people are using it to promote their fundraising pages, and they are associating their Twitter username with their donations too.

Plus, it’s not just individuals using the site, as more and more charities are using Twitter all the time. Here’s just one fantastic example of how a charity can use Twitter and Justgiving, which I noticed from CIWF whilst writing this blog post:

Is this just a fad?

It’s difficult to say whether the current buzz around Twitter will stay, but there is a definite buzz, and that’s important to acknowledge. There’s been a noticeable increase in the number of mentions of Justgiving on Twitter recently, and that’s only going to get bigger as even more people join Twitter.

Isn’t it only for self-obsessed geeks?

Well, er… no. It’s true that Twitter was initially most popular amongst tech-savvy early adopters, but its push into mainstream consciousness has been helped by famous ‘tweeters’ including Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and the world’s most followed account (with a massive 376,000 odd followers) Barack Obama.

Oh, and there are chartered accountants too – my favourite quote on this I leave to Phil, who raised money in February by fasting for 24 hours. On a blog post celebrating his challenge (with the rather unexpected title of ‘Accountant donates 13,661 condoms‘) he wrote about the technology he used to raise money:

“Thanks Dennis, it was fun, but also good to use some of the technology around. Like our Blog, twitter and facebook to launch and call for sponsors, twitter, friendfeed and facebook to keep people updated as the day progressed, and justgiving.com so that I didn’t have to handle any of the money, sponsor forms and the like. It is times like this that I appreciate what some of the technology does for us although I think I still have a lot to learn to get the best out of what’s available now !”

For us, that’s proof that these tools, whilst still relatively niche, are growing as part of an online technology toolkit for raising money. We’ll be showing more examples of how people are using Twitter over the coming months, as well as highlighting how different people at Justgiving use Twitter. But to keep up to date with us, what else would we ask but to follow us on our year-old Twitter account: twitter.com/justgiving

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