Archive for Justgiving for Charities

Phil Packer finishes the London Marathon

May 14, 2009 at 9:31 am · Filed under In the News, Inspirational fundraising, Justgiving Resources, Justgiving Towers, New on Justgiving, Our News, Success Stories ·Tagged , , , , ,

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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.

philpackergraph2

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.

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How we are working to help charities integrate data

May 13, 2009 at 5:09 pm · Filed under In the News, Justgiving for Charities, Service updates ·Tagged , ,

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:

xml_payment_reports

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

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Pampers & UNICEF digital fundraising night

May 12, 2009 at 6:32 pm · Filed under Best Practice, How fundraisers use Justgiving, In the News, New on Justgiving ·Tagged , ,

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

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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.

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Justgiving is changing – part 1

May 8, 2009 at 4:09 pm · Filed under Justgiving for Charities, New on Justgiving ·Tagged

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:

newlogo

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…

FlashWooshWe 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.

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Flora London Marathon report 2009

May 8, 2009 at 2:44 pm · Filed under Justgiving for Charities ·Tagged , , ,

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.

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