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Get yourself featured on the new Justgiving homepage

May 21, 2009 at 9:30 am · Filed under JG Insider, New on Justgiving, Our News ·Tagged fundraiser photos

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!

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How to badge your email signature

March 7, 2008 at 5:20 pm · Filed under JG Insider ·Tagged Badge, email signature

Today we received an email from Laura at Sue Ryder Care that included one of the pretty little buttons we make available in the Charity Account.

What buttons you say? The ones you get by following these instructions…

Go to the Charity Account at www.justgiving.com/charityaccount. Click on the Fundraising resources tab, then on the Buttons and logos link on the left.

There’s lots to choose from, like this little chap here:

Or on Laura’s email signature like this:

That button, when clicked on, takes you to their fundraising area on Justgiving. And it’s a great way to promote the site – even if people don’t click on it, they’ll still read it and potentially remember it…

Find out how to do it yourself by watching the short video tutorial below:

Click here to watch the video in full screen

Also don’t forget to to encourage your fundraisers to put badges on their email signatures (which means that possible donors can get straight from their email to their fundraising page). Simply direct your supporters to here for simple instructions on how to do this.

Now on my email signature, I have a very snazzy headline animator (courtesy of Feedburner) that shows the latest posts from this very blog:

And what’s cool about that is that I can get stats for it (I love stats) – and since our helpdesk have this in their signature too, a lot of eyes get to see it – 1,386 people in the last 30 days in fact.

So, whilst not many people may have clicked on the animator, a hell of a lot have seen it – and it’s funny what things sometimes stick in people’s minds…

Who knows, it might even be why you’re reading this!

And for an old post on another great email signature, click here. And you can find out how to add a fundraising page badge to your signature here.

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RSS on Justgiving – keep up to date easily

February 13, 2008 at 9:49 am · Filed under Best Practice, JG Insider ·Tagged RSS

RSS – you heard of it? Possibly. Have you used it? Probably (without realising it, too).

What does it mean? Really Simple Syndication, apparently. But who cares about that? What it does and enables you to do is what’s important.

There are plenty of other great posts out there that explain it in great detail, but in a nutshell, most people use RSS to draw lots of content and info from many different sources into one place.

Are you on Facebook? Do you hang on your mini-feed’s every update? Well, that’s just a collection of RSS feeds from all the profiles of your friends. So instead of visiting all your friends profiles, you just watch the mini-feed come to you. It really is that simple.

Justgiving has had RSS feeds on the site for a while, and they are the brains behind our widgets – the widget is effectively a way of presenting the live feed from a fundraising page in a cool and funky way.

But it is the feed that transmits all the info the widget uses, info that can be read by any RSS reader.

Which, ahem, leads nicely onto RSS readers (aka RSS aggregators) and how to draw all your content together. There are lots of them out there, but two of the more popular are probably iGoogle and Netvibes (or you could just use the Firefox browser).

Here are a couple of examples of what you can do on with both of them when you register for free:

On Netvibes…

Or iGoogle:

What I’ve added to both those examples are the feeds from the charities blog the status blog and our main Justgiving blog [well I had to really ], plus a feed from our Flickr site to keep you up to date with all things JG.

What’s more interesting perhaps are the feeds from three random fundraising pages so you could keep on top of some or all of your fundraisers, checking how much they’ve raised.

To get the feed for a page, you just click on the RSS button under the donation totals, as shown below:

Quite a few phones come with RSS readers too these days, so you can even keep up to date with any fundraising page wherever you are – it’s how I kept up to date with the Cutty Sark page.

I’ve also added a couple of feeds from two very interesting charity-centric blogs, not to mention the feed of the latest Fundraising news from Third Sector.

Both of those readers are very clever in that they let you share content, so you could add my JG example pages to your own iGoogle or netvibes page by clicking on this crazy Google link or lovely netvibes button below…

Also, you should take a look at the new BETA version of the BBC homepage – it’s all based on RSS feeds from the different parts of the website and is a great example of a website giving its users control over what they see and how it’s presented. More on that in the summer…

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New Columns on Payment reports! Wow!

October 31, 2007 at 5:17 pm · Filed under JG Insider, Service updates

Jg_insider
Now, I’ve announced some exciting new features in my time, but this is possibly the best – yes, we have added two new columns for you to select when downloading payment reports. And what snappy column titles they are:

So there you have it, Estimated VAT and Net Donation Minus Estimated VAT. A real cool addition to the column selections.

But seriously, this is an important update, one that many of you asked for. Why? Well, it’s all to do with the way we transfer money to you.

As you know, we charge a 5% transaction fee on every donation and VAT is applicable on that amount. But we only calculate the VAT for the total fees for each payment we make to you, not on each individual donation.

In the Finance Reports section of the Charity Account, you can see a high level breakdown of the Gross and Net payments as below (with amounts erased, obviously):

You can download a PDF giving you a one page invoice detailing the total amounts and deductions when you click on view details but you can now see that breakdown in the detailed reports for each payment too.

So if you need to attribute VAT on each donation, or record net donation without VAT (depending on your financial systems), you can easily do so once a payment report has been created.

But remember, these figures are only estimated per donation since the actual VAT is calculated on the total fees taken – dividing the total VAT to all the donations will inevitably cause some small rounding errors.

So there you are, that was me trying to make VAT exciting. Now I know how Adam Hart-Davis feels…

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JG Insider: how much have you raised?

August 14, 2007 at 10:33 am · Filed under JG Insider

Jg_insider Today’s lesson is a simple one – how to find out how much you have raised on Justgiving since you joined.

If you’ve ever wondered how many pages have been created, the total donated through the site how much Gift Aid has been reclaimed, follow these instructions…

When you log-in to the charity account at www.justgiving.com/charityaccount, you’ll see the welcome screen:

If you then click on Total Raised To Date you’ll see the details below, accurate to the end of the previous day:

Obviously the example used above is for our "Demo Charity" and is not the financial records of an actual charity on the site, but it does show you how easy it is to do.

Try it yourself and see how much your charity has raised online!

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