Last month, we released part one of our first ever London Marathon report, which included all the online fundraising statistics you’ll ever need to know about the most popular fundraising event in the world. If you missed part 1, you can download a copy by filling in the short form here.

Part 2 of the report includes benchmarking data on totals raised by different charity categories, as well as revealing average individual totals and donation amounts by category. If you want to know how well your charity did in the context of the total raised, or in comparison to other categories, this is the only way to find out.

Download your copy now below in your preferred format:

Flora London Marathon 2009 report – part 2 (pdf, 1.4 MB)

Flora London Marathon 2009 report – part 2 (Word doc, 1.33 MB)

Please let us know any feedback by leaving a comment below or emailing our insights team at insights@justgiving.com.

As you may know, JustGiving automatically claims the Gift Aid on all the eligible donations made on the site.

We submit claims to HMRC every month who then process the claim and send the Gift Aid to us. This process usually takes 6-8 weeks. We then deduct the fees and we pay the funds directly to the charity’s bank account.

Our systems and processes were adjusted last year on short notice to accommodate the change to the basic rate of tax and the introduction of Transitional Relief. (If you’d like to find out how we did this then you can read about it here)

For the charities who use JustGiving the new Gift Aid rate and Transitional Relief has been claimed correctly by us for them.

However many charities have been experiencing difficulties in incorporating the new Gift Aid and Transitional Relief for their offline donations, and this has resulted in an increased number of incorrect Gift Aid claims being submitted to HMRC.

The knock on effect of this has been that HMRC have had to extend their turn around period for processing Gift Aid claims while they deal with the backlog caused by these incorrect claims.  But with the extra training and technology upgrades they’ve been putting into place this is expected to only be a short term measure.

So, if your charity is experiencing a delay with a Gift Aid claim for donations made through JustGiving then please be reassured. The claim will have been submitted correctly, we are in regular contact with HMRC about the issue and we’ll make the payment through to you as soon as HMRC are able to process the claim.

Here’s an idea.

Get free money saving tips from Justfourquid.com and give some of what you save back to charity.

The ME Association, which supports thousands of people in the UK suffering from ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, has created Justfourquid.com because, as they say, “if each of the estimated 250,000 people in the UK with ME/CFS gave just four quid, we could raise £1 million.”

There will be a different credit crunch-friendly tip on the website every week. This week’s tip could help you save £40 a year and inspires you to get creative into the bargain…

Once you start saving, just make a donation to the cause on one of the campaign’s two JustGiving pages:

http://www.justgiving.com/jfq-rrf

http://www.justgiving.com/jfq-meruk

Sam Kemp from Barclays got in touch with us recently, to let us know about a “very exciting event that I am tracking hard for” as part of a big week of fundraising for Barclays.

LifeCycle, which starts today and aims to raise £250k for Children’s Hospices UK, is a cycle from John O’Groats to Lands End which forms part of Barclays’ annual charity week. The team sets off from John O’Groats today and they’ll be letting you know how it’s going on their website.

They’re already half way to their big fundraising target, but there’s still a long way to go. So if you’d like to support them, you can make a donation on their Justgiving page.

We asked Sam a few quick questions about the event, before they all set off:

How did you choose Children’s Hospices UK as this year’s charity?

We wanted to raise funds to benefit needy children across many communities. As Children’s Hospices UK is a national charity, it has a national network which can support and assist us in the ride and drive out PR. There are also children’s hospices along the route which we can visit.

Who came up with the idea of LifeCycle?

Ian Tetsill and Mark Attwood from Barclays wanted to do the ride and it was an obvious opportunity to raise money for charity. This then dovetailed with Ian’s involvement in organising a BCB charity event.

How have you all found the fundraising so far?

The fundraising is one of the key reasons we are doing the ride. The generosity of the donations we have received provides great motivation to go out training when the weather isn’t great!

What different ways have you promoted your Justgiving page?

The main way has been through our LifeCycle website: http://www.lifecycle-uk.net/

Have you got any good fundraising tips to pass on, especially to other companies?

E-shots work really well as a way of advising lots of people on what we are doing. Getting a professional website done also really helps – you can direct people there with all the relevant info in one place.

Good luck with the cycle to everyone involved – we look forward to hearing how you get on!

You may have read on the blog that over the coming months Justgiving will be changing. For the last 18 months we’ve been listening to our users and working really hard to make some great changes to the site. We have a new logo and a new thermometer which will change colour depending on what our charities and users choose.

These changes have been made to allow Justgiving to fade into the background a little and let our users shine through. We are also changing the homepage to reflect this – we want to feature more of our amazing fundraisers’ campaigns. This is where we need your help. If you have a Justgiving page and would like to get exposure on the homepage for your fundraising efforts then please get in touch.

Simply send a photo of yourself and your fundraising page address to heather@justgiving.com. Due to the size of the placement the photo needs to be of relatively high quality, either taken with a digital camera (anything 3 mega pixels or more) or an SLR camera. The more interesting the photo the better, we’re looking for great photos of you fundraising, training or just doing something silly – whether that means running, cycling, or having your head shaved! Photos of you on your own or as part of a team are equally welcome.

What works best:
* Photos of happy people taken outside in natural sunlight
* Active photos of people taking part in an event – no sitting on the sofa or merely posing in your tracksuit!
* Photos that can be cropped as a square or a horizontal rectangle – vertical rectangular shapes don’t really work
* People wearing colourful kit, fancy dress or uniforms
* If you are taking place in an active event with equipment, such as a row or a cycle ride get a photo of you and your bike, boat, horse, whatever!

What we don’t want:
* Red eyes
* Random photos of ‘fundraising in the pub’
* Partial or full nudity! (you’d be surprised at what we get sent…)
* Blurry or out of focus pictures
* Headshots

Not every photo we receive will be posted on the homepage but if your image is chosen we will let you know promptly. Your photo will stay up on the Justgiving.com homepage for approximately 1-2 months, in rotation with other photos. (just keep on refreshing the homepage!)

Thank you!

You can’t have failed to hear about Phil Packer’s amazing challenge to complete the London Marathon over 13 days after being left paraplegic due to a rocket attack in Basra last year. We’ve followed his quest to raise £1 million pounds for Help for Heroes and were there to walk the last mile of his Marathon challenge with him on Saturday. It was amazing to see quite how many people came along on the day to cheer him on, hundreds of well wishers, family, friends and the royal military police were there lining the last hundred yards.

After Phil Packer was injured last year he was told he would never walk again, but he has defied medics by not only walking but also completing the 26.2 miles of the London Marathon. What is even more impressive is that he only re-learnt to walk with crutches a month before his marathon.  We have all been so moved by Phil’s challenge that we just had to be there when he finished – cheering, taking photos and tweeting. We even managed to get an interview with him:

We met some lovely people such as Chloe, who gave up her job to help Phil’s campaign, Sir Steve Redgrave who presented Phil with his medal for completing the marathon, Angela Packer, Phil’s absolutely wonderful mother and many, many, more.

The  response from the public has been fantastic and the amount that has been raised on his Justgiving page has been growing at a fantastic rate  – every minute the amount on his page seems to go up my another thousand pounds or so. Just look at how his page has grown over the few weeks since he started his marathon walk.

Phil Packer is now just over £100k away from reaching his target – he is so focused on reaching his target amount for Help for Heroes that he has already set up his next challenge. Next month he will climb the 3,000ft vertical rock face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, requiring him to do 4,000 pull ups to reach the top.

Please visit his page and help him get to his target.

At the end of 2008, we spoke to a number of charities about the data integration issues facing them, when importing Justgiving data into a range of different and highly customised donor databases. We recognised that although the issue was complex, there were ways we could make life easier. So what have we done since then?

We’ve used their input to develop a number of immediate enhancements, including the bulk custom code uploader we released in March, and the development of an XML output format (more details below). However, these were just the first steps in an ongoing process.

We want to make sure that charities experience great and seamless data integration – our vision is to help get data from JustGiving straight into charity CRM systems without the need for manual processes.

We’ve written a data integration consultation document that we would really welcome your input on it.

Its purpose is to:

• give an overview of our findings
• detail steps to help integration
• give an overview of the tools currently available and those developed as a result of original charity feedback
• discuss our vision to better serve your needs
• give an overview of the first phase of work
• invite your feedback on what priorities you see as most important

Download the document here:
JustGiving Data Integration Consultation May 2009 (pdf 889 kb)

We’d be very grateful if you could send us your feedback to datateam@justgiving.com by Friday, 26 June 2009

Addition of XML format for payment reports

From Wednesday 27 May, you’ll see an additional option when you download your payment reports in the charity account. As well as the CSV and Excel files, there will be an option to download in a new output format of XML. This will enable you to use the data we provide using many more systems. We’ll be providing an XSLT template to help you transform XML into different formats.

For the first release, you will only be able to download donation payment reports in XML, not Gift Aid payment reports. Here’s how that looks:

Update – Due to some technical delays, we won’t be releasing this update to reports until Friday 5th June

We were invited by Procter & Gamble to help support a rather unique fundraising initiative this week. The P&G team here in Geneva wanted to help their executives learn more about the digital world, and they came upon the idea of a “digital fundraising night”.

The idea is that four teams of P&G teams (plus experts) competed over one evening, using digital channels, to raise as much money as possible for UNICEF to help eliminate Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus.

Lee and Jonathan from Justgiving helped out with creating the fundraising pages and lending their digital expertise for the night, and you can see how all four teams are getting on at www.justgiving.com/pampersunicef

For example, team “feel n learn” have created a Facebook fan page, promoted videos, sent SMS and emails to their personal contacts and contacted relevant bloggers, all to promote a fundraising page at www.justgiving.com/pampersfeelnlearn

We’ve not been asked by any other companies to do this before, so it is an interesting experiment in teaching staff how to use these new channels by raising money for a great cause. We’ll be reporting back over the coming days on the success of the event, and what other companies (and charities) can learn about fundraising in the digital world.

We wanted to give you glimpse of the many ways Justgiving is changing in the coming months, and we’re starting to use our new logo in our upcoming reports on the credit crunch, data integration, and the 2009 Flora London Marathon. If you’ve yet to see it, here it is:

As some of you know, we’ve been hard at work for the last 18 months creating an entirely new technology platform for Justgiving that will enable us to innovate and create new tools for charities and their supporters much faster and more frequently than we’ve ever been able to do.

As we talked to our users, we realised how tired our old look had become. ‘Safe’ and ‘trustworthy’ was how some of you described it. ‘Charmingly retro’ was also mentioned (enough said). Though we are sceptical of branding changes for the sake of cosmetics, we felt it was time for our site to reflect who we really are.

Our individual users told us that what they valued was not just a safe, secure way of collecting money, but also, and most importantly, a community – 7.4 million and counting – where they find like-minded people and therefore raise more money. Our charities also told us they wanted their brand and identity to shine on Justgiving – not the other way around. And we at Justgiving wanted a look that reflected the ethical nature of our business, and our exclusive focus on charity fundraising.

So we listened to all that and chose a new look, with the help of Michael Wallis (one of the team behind the hugely successful ‘We are Macmillan Cancer Support’ re-brand). We think it’s bold, simple and true. Because it is, essentially, a new fundraising ‘thermometer’, it celebrates our users’ and charities’ stories and achievements rather than our own.

Here’s a preview of what it will look like…

We like that it actually does a job and is therefore not just a pretty thing (though we do think it looks great). And it is designed to change to take on the colours chosen by our users and charities. In short, we thought it was time for Justgiving to fade a little bit into the background, and leave the limelight to you.

Our new look will go live in early June, along with a brand new site. Watch this space…

Anne-Marie Huby, Managing Director, Justgiving.

As you may have read in Third Sector or UK fundraising, we recorded our best ever London Marathon figures this year, helping almost 18,000 people raise a staggering £22 million for charities. With fundraising still continuing, we’re anticipating a final total of £25 million to be raised.

We’ve put together a comprehensive report giving you all the details up to the day of the marathon about how much traffic we had (over 5 million visits in the week pre-Marathon), how many donations we processed (peaking at 2 a second) and how our 100% uptime enabled unprecedented fundraising for charities on Justgiving. We’re including all of last year’s figures too to put them in context.

Find out all the details by downloading part one of our Flora London Marathon 2009 online fundraising analysis report. Part 2 will be issued in June with all the post-event stats that you’ll need.

Last year, we had to limit access to charity reporting over the marathon period because our servers couldn’t cope. We said sorry, and committed to making sure it didn’t happen again. Since then,  we’ve spent £1.5 million on investing in the following areas: improving our infrastructure and updating reporting.

Read the whole story in our Flora London Marathon 2009 online fundraising analysis report.