Archive for Charity Site of the Month

Bullying UK – charity site of the month October 2008

October 7, 2008 at 8:46 am · Filed under Charity Site of the Month, Justgiving for Charities ·Tagged , ,

Now we’re in October, it’s time for a new charity site of the month. And this month’s winner is… Bullying UK – www.bullying.co.uk

Bullying UK logo

It’s a great example of a charity making the most of a variety of internet tools and services, including masses of social media content like blogs and widgets. I caught up with John Carnell, founder and CEO of Bullying UK, and asked him to give us some insight into their charity’s online strategy.

What does your charity do? And how does the internet fit in with your goals?

Bullying UK is the new name for Bullying Online, founded in 1999 as the UK’s first 100% web delivered charity. In that time we have seen explosive growth in our service to the point where we are regularly listed in the top 500K websites worldwide (no small feat).

When I founded the charity, the internet was still finding its feet, but I knew the internet was key to creating my dream of a low cost, high impact charity that could out-perform the traditional bricks and mortar charities of the day.

To date, I’m not aware of very many charities that are 100% web delivered as we are.

What’s your view on using the internet as a charity?

It’s our reason for being in many ways – our success as an organisation is directly tied to the explosive success of the internet. As new services are created, we can be there at the cutting edge and once the majority of users discover the service, we are already well placed to serve them in their new surroundings. In most cases, we can link those services into our main website www.bullying.co.uk through APIs

An API? Could you expand on that?

An Application Programming Interface is a way websites can exchange information securely and usually without the user having to leave the website they are on. So if you wanted to allow your users to post images from your website directly from Flickr, you can hook into Flickr’s API to make that happen. The benefit to the user is increased functionality and the benefit to you is they stayed on your site to do it.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg as every service that offers an API has different functionality. It’s something you will need programmers to integrate for you but the benefits are huge.

What are some of the online tools you use and, more importantly, why do you use them?

To list them would take an entire blog post, so ill tell you about the ones I think offer the greatest impact for charities right now:

Facebook – If you are not on here with a fan page or Causes.org, drop what you are doing (after reading this blog) and go do this now. [it's free and easy to do, just go here]

Widgets – the Justgiving widget is a great example of a way to spread your cause further than just your website. Think about how a widget your supporters can use on their personal site can impact your cause – see widgetbox.com for ideas and our own Uniteagainstbullying.com widget.

Lifecasting – Facebook, myspace, flickr, 12seconds.tv (plug) are all excellent life casters. Using them you can tell your supporters what you’re up to or mash it all together using friendfeed and display it on your site. Supporters love to learn more about your cause, you can make it easy for them.

Can you explain why you created a widget for supporters to use?

The further your brand spreads, the more chance you have of creating engagement. You can spend money, or you can do it organically through a viral mechanism like a widget. In the case of Unite Against Bullying, we created a simple non interactive button and wrapped it in a viral installer that allows a user in less than 30 seconds to take that button and put in onto their own site, be that a blog, social network or website.

This is where the magic happens. Friends of that user then see it and embed it in their website or click the button and read all about the campaign and so on. At this point, the Unite Against Bullying campaign brand is seen by over 100k people a week and up to 100 new sites a week join the fight against bullying from all corners of the world.

And the best bit, all that brand exposure every week for FREE. That’s right, just a day of internal setup and we were ready to roll.

How do you go about fundraising online?

At the moment we are revamping our online fundraising for 2009 but rest assured Justgiving will be at the centre of our efforts. One of our new trustees recently did a walk through the three lochs of Scotland and raised over £500 using the Justgiving widget. We see the potential when married with our unique online work to create a fundraising strategy that will reach a massive audience.

Do you see the internet as a fundraising tool only, or does it fit into a wider online strategy?

Any charity that looks at the internet as a money making tool only needs to think again – not only are you missing the point, but you’re losing out on a valuable source of feedback and user engagement that, for my mind, is worth all the money in the world.

What tools do you use to help the stewardship of your supporters?

We are just now rolling out Salesforce for Non-profits, we learned about it through of network of supporters on the above sites. I would say this: if any charity wants a way to tidy up all those loose processes and create order around how they communicate with supporters, Salesforce for Non-profits is perfect.

At Bullying UK we like to work on the basis of Invent it, Create it. SF appears to work to this philosophy perfectly, giving us the tools to build the services we need to interface with our supporters. Check out FaceForce, the Facebook add-on for Salesforce to get an idea of what I mean. [this is where you can go straight from a supporters record in Salesforce to their Facebook profile]

Oh, and it’s free to non-profits for 10 user licenses and you get 80% discount on extra licences. Plus, check out Vertical Response, who give non-profits 10k free email newsletter credits a month as part of SF-non profit (WAY COOL).

How do you keep up with online trends?

Not sleeping helps, but really I’ve been around the web for so long I’m actually part of the furniture. After a while you get a feeling for the next big thing or social meme (pronounced /miːm/), although RickRolling still baffles me.

I follow a few different sites – Techcrunch is always helpful, but don’t rely on it since they can only post so many stories a day. inquisitr.com is a good one for the off beat, and I like Duncan’s analysis of new services. He is critical, but fair and helps to point out potential problems in new services that have saved me wasting time on a good idea, badly executed (my favourite expression in evaluating new services).

Do you have anything else you’d like to add?

If you’re a small charity, look to the internet as a place to reinvent yourself. Bullying UK runs on less than 50K a year yet supports over one million people a year (through our website and email service).

For larger charities I would say take more risks and be inventive. There are way too many carbon copy charity web projects that are either offline ideas brought online (misses the point) or just a pale imitation of a superior web property.

Take a look at Click, Create & Print www.bullying.co.uk/poster to see how we took three very different technologies and united them in a way no one else has thought of. [it's great fun, have a try yourself!]

The wheel is perfectly good as a round object, no need for a reinvention…..!

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Great thanks for talking to me John, hopefully there are lots of tips that other charities can learn from – and keep up the great work on the site :-)

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iPledge for Buwan Kothi – June charity site of the month

June 24, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Charity Site of the Month ·Tagged , , ,

It’s been a while since the last charity site of the month, but June brings us another gem:

Ipledge_3
www.iPledge.org.uk

In the words of The Buwan Kothi International Trust, the iPledge site is a “blog that celebrates the efforts and hard work of our many supporters – and reminds everyone that making a donation is not the only way of supporting our activities“.

I caught up with Kevin from the Trust who had some very interesting things to say about devolved fundraising, word of mouth marketing and using free web tools.

Read on or download the full story: Download ipledge.doc

What is your charity and what do you do?

In December 2005, friends and relatives of Gilly Mundy and Debbie Quargnolo travelled from the UK to the tiny rural village of Buwan Kothi in Haryana, northern India, to celebrate their wedding. We were all overwhelmed by the warmth and generosity of the welcome from the village and resolved to develop and strengthen links between people in the UK and Haryana.

In March 2006, the Buwan Kothi International Trust was formed to raise funds for projects in Haryana and our major objective was to build a primary school in Buwan Kothi, a task that was given an even greater impetus by Gilly’s sudden death in March 2007, aged only 36.

Where did the idea of the iPledge site come from?

We wanted to celebrate the hard work of our many supporters and remind everyone that making a donation is not the only way of supporting our activities. Making a pledge can involve making a difference by taking part in (or organising) a sponsored event, or volunteering some free time, or talking to friends and colleagues about the Trust and what it has achieved so far.

Over the last year, we have managed to raise a considerable sum whilst keeping our costs to a minimum (less than £40 in 2007-08 out of a total of £52K). This has only been possible because of using the internet and e-mail rather than more expensive publicity but also because we have actively encouraged ‘devolved fundraising’, by letting supporters do whatever they can to help, without necessarily organising everything ourselves.

What did you want the iPledge site to achieve?

The iPledge site will hopefully help to encourage supporters to see the charity as belonging not to its trustees but to everyone that gets involved. The charity was the brainchild of a large group of friends with many skills and a variety of different talents and we want to keep that ethos at the forefront of our fundraising activities.

Using a blog enables everyone to see the range of activities that people have pledged to undertake and act as a reminder that each individual supportive action is part of a wider community seeking to help the Trust’s work. And, of course, it has cost us next to nothing to set up!

What sort of feedback have you had?

It’s early days yet but feedback has been very positive. For example, the number of supporters pledging to take part in our fundraising cycle ride in July looks set to top the 26 riders who took part last year (and raised more than £20K between them).

Some of your fundraisers have raised more than others – do you know why some are more successful?

For us, the amount raised is less important than the fact that so many people are willing to make an effort. Some supporters have wider – and wealthier – circles of friends than others, but every penny counts.

As a new and small charity, we also know our profile is nowhere near as high as the big charities, but that donations are nearly always made by families and friends supporting individual efforts, rather than on our name recognition, so the more people pledge to fundraise for us, the better. Building our profile by word of mouth helps to keep our costs to a minimum and make sure that so far, 99.9% of the money we have raise directly supports communities in Haryana.

How has Justgiving helped?

Devolved fundraising involves surrendering a certain amount of overall control, but as a charity we have an obligation to ensure that fundraising undertaken in our name is accountable and transparent. Justgiving provides us with this, because donations come straight to us rather than through each individual fundraiser.

Anyone making a donation can be completely confident that their money goes directly – and promptly – to the Trust. It also helps individual supporters to contact friends and family all over the country and encourage donations without the fuss of asking for cheques or collecting cash.

Was it easy to set up the blog on Blogger?

Setting up a blog on Blogger is very straightforward. Some knowledge of basic HTML is needed for changing from one of Blogger’s basic templates to something like the free template
we used to improve the look of the site, but the basic templates aren’t that bad.

If anyone wants to borrow our idea for their own charity and is struggling, then I’m happy to try and explain to them in more detail how we set up our blog.

Did it take up much time or resource?

Initial set up wasn’t too time-consuming because we had the necessary IT skills amongst our supporters. Maintaining the site is a doddle – it takes a matter of minutes to add new pledges via the Blogger ‘dashboard’ and because the site is accessed via a web browser, requires no special software or programming knowledge. Mainly, it has involved adding a title to a post, some standard wording and pasting in an individual’s Justgiving widget.

**********

Thanks for taking the time to speak to us Kevin, you’ve shared a lot of useful information that other charities can use. The concept of ‘devolved fundraising’ is something we are seeing more and more on Justgiving – as I mentioned recently on the blog with the rise of occasion fundraising.

It’s also a great example of using free tools like Blogger to start some word-of-mouth marketing and generate a *buzz* around a small charity.

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Feb Charity site of the month

February 25, 2008 at 11:35 am · Filed under Best Practice, Charity Site of the Month, Success Stories

This month we have the story of www.napac.org.uk, the website for
The National Association for People Abused in Childhood

Napac

What’s great about this site? Well, I’ve created a short video walk-through of their site to explain exactly why, but the most interesting thing is how this site came to be great (in my opinion)…

And the reason is that Helen from the charity saw our best practice webinar recording and decided to update their site – and they’ve already reaped the rewards.

Before you take a look at the video, I asked Helen a few questions about the site:

How did you come across the webinar recording?

I was sent an email on the 30th of January with the subject “New year solutions with Justgiving” – One of the articles featured the Best Practice Webinar recording and I decided to have a look…and I am so glad that I did!

Was it useful, would you recommend it?

It was so useful! I kept pausing every couple of minutes to make notes, jotted down all of the examples and tips…I ended up with two A4 sides of notes telling me exactly what I needed to do to give the donations part of our website a much needed face-lift. I would highly recommend it!

It’s so clear, so simple and the tips absolutely work…having the Justgiving webinar to guide me meant that I didn’t have to reinvent the “fundraising wheel” – all I had to do was use other people’s past experience and knowledge and put it into practice on our website.

Did it prompt you to update the fundraising area on your site?

I was already thinking that I needed to get around to sorting out the donations section of our website and watching this webinar was the catalyst I needed to get me moving. I spent a week completely re-building and re-writing the entire donations part of our website.

Has this update had any effect so far?

The day after it was launched a new Justgiving fundraising page was created! It was such a great feeling…the work I’d put in revamping the site was already showing it’s benefits and our new supporter has raised £30 for us so far! I also knew about the importance of supporting our supporters so after being sent a notification of the new Justgiving fundraising page I was able to immediately email David Still and tell him how much we appreciated his support.

I was also able to add the widget for his fundraising page to our website so that everyone can see who our supporters are and what they’re doing! The effect of the update so far has been incredible – I am working on a “making the most of your Justgiving webpage” document in eager anticipation of there being many more pages created in the near future!

Have you had any feedback on the site?

There hasn’t yet been any feedback on the site updates but I’ll soon be sending our a mass email to all of our supporters so that they can take a look – I’m sure this will result in some feedback!

Did you do all this yourself – was it easy to do?

I did all of the re-building and re-writing myself – but I had so many ideas from the webinar and the resources on the Justgiving website that I can’t take any credit for it!

What was initially a daunting task was made so easy by the Justgiving team – and Jonathan took the time to look at what I’d done and gave me some constructive feedback so that I could make further improvements.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The only thing I’d like to add is that it’s well worth the investment of time to re-vamp the donations part of any charity website because you very quickly reap the benefits…plus it’s great fun thinking of creative ways to get people to look at the donations part of the website.

So, check out the video (it’s best to open the link in a new window) and see why their re-vamped site has already lead to one more fundraiser, and remember to watch the webinar recording yourself to learn how to do the same!

Justgiving charity site of the month Feb 2008 from Jonathan @ JG on Vimeo.

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Charity site of the month

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

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…

Jg_and_moo_2

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):

Marathon_moo

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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Dangerous Ground – charity site of the month

December 7, 2007 at 10:45 am · Filed under Charity Site of the Month, How fundraisers use Justgiving, In the News ·Tagged , ,

December’s charity website of the month is brought to us by The No More Landmines Trust, as they’re responsible for the quite awesome www.dangerousground.org

As the site says:

Just getting around can be fatal for people living in landmine affected areas. To highlight the issue we tried to go round 50,000 m2 of ground without touching it and photographed every step of the way.

Well, what does that look like? Well, pretty cool, really – see the video below:

Landmine_2
That’s Lewis, he’s a free runner (remember Jump London?) and member of Urban Freeflow, so he can get  50,000 m2 of London’s South Bank without touching it.

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for the people who live near the 49,855 m2 Lboek Svay minefield in Cambodia, where the money raised through the site will first be spent.

Because, of course, whilst this highly imaginative campaign raises awareness, the charity also hopes to raise money. So they set up a fundraising page at www.justgiving.com/dangerousground to collect donations online.

I asked Becky Maynard, Head of Fundraising at No More Landmines, some questions about the site:

What did you want you’re the dangerous ground site to achieve?

We wanted to raise awareness of the landmine issue which has a daily impact on millions of people around the world. Because the number of deaths from landmines are not newsbreaking or headline-making people don’t realise the terrifying impact they have on so many people every day of their lives.

We are also aiming to raise funds to clear a specific minefield in Cambodia where people who have lived through a terrible regime, been made refugees and in almost all cases lost family members are struggling just to survive – they cannot farm their land or access clean water because of the landmine threat.

What sort of feedback have you had?

Amazing feedback and hundreds of comments on YouTube but your support could help turn more of that interest into donations! Everyone who has seen the films thinks they are fantastic (or maybe they just say that to me!!).

How successful has it been in raising awareness and getting people to donate?

So far over 85,000 people have viewed one of the dangerous ground videos and thousands have visited the website. Donations have been slower because the YouTube page does not link through to our Justgiving page! [Ed. that's easy to change :-) ]

How did you get uk2.net to help you?

Through a personal contact! All of the people who featured, directed, produced, jumped off high things and the rest gave their time and skills for free – as have UK2

Why did you decide to use videos, pictures and Google maps to illustrate the project and your campaign?

In the flipbook we really wanted to create a link between a 50,000 square metre area in London and the same size are in Cambodia but also the key differences between them and the freedom to walk on the ground that we all take for granted.

The ad film is also a reminder that we can go about our daily lives without worrying what might be just below the surface. I have visited communities who literally have landmines on their doorstep and it is quite terrifying, especially when I see innocent young children running around who could have no concept of the level of the danger they face.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

This week marks the 10 year anniversary of the Mine Ban Treaty / Ottawa Convention which banned the use, manufacture, transfer and stockpiling of landmines. Although it has been very successful there is still huge amounts of work to be done!

A big thanks go to Becky for answering my questions – we wish you good luck with a fantastic idea and superb website.

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On a “social web” note of interest, our attention was drawn to this site as it was one of the most popular tagged sites on del.icio.us (which can be used on Justgiving pages too!). If you don’t know what that means, watch the video below:

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