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.
This month’s fundraiser of the month is London Marathon runner Simon Foster, who was nominated by his colleague Samantha Yeend. So far, Simon has raised an immense £27,909 for the Teenage Cancer Trust.
As a result of the exceptional amount that Simon has raised, we invited him to give a talk at the London Marathon meet-up that we held earlier this month. He told us a very moving fundraising story, talked about his fundraising experience and shared some good tips – if you missed it you can watch the video.
On Monday we did a quick interview with Simon, luckily he wasn’t too tired to answer our questions!
1. What inspired you to run the marathon?
My friend’s daughter is a lovely 15 year old called Emily. She is a happy smiling bundle of fun and also a little bit mischievous. Emily was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia in August last year. Seeing her in Hospital and how scared she was at the time I told her she must Never Give Up. We made a deal (and we shook hands on it too !) – Emily promised me that she would be strong, fight and Never Give Up. In return I promised I’d do something I couldn’t give up either and that was to run the London Marathon.
2. You have raised an absolutely incredible amount, have you been surprised by the amount?
Absolutely staggered and blown away. Never did I think we would raise these sort of sums. To be honest I feel very humbled and deeply touched by everyone’s generosity. What’s more it has not just been people donating, I have been inundated with questions and enquiries after Emily and how she is doing. Emily reads the Justgiving page every day and has drawn great strength from the messages of support and positive thoughts for her. Thanks to Justgiving we have had donations from New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Germany, Switzerland – in fact from all over the world. It’s been brilliant
3. What are your best fundraising tips?
Don’t ask for money ! It sounds strange but just tell your story and why you have been motivated to do this. Another tip is to do something where people feel they are getting something back. I organised a golf day prior to the Marathon. People were happy to pay a slightly higher price for a great day and all profits went to the Charity. It doesn’t have to be something big either, for example if you’re a student why not ask some of your friends to make some cakes and donate them to the cause. Selling them to fellow students for a few pounds each, explaining the reasons behind it gives you instant donations for your cause!
4. Can you tell us more about your charity?
Emily was admitted to a Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT) ward at UCH in London. Every day 6 teenagers are diagnosed with some form of cancer. TCT help to create specialist cancer units which give teenagers the best care while also allowing them to be teenagers. This is really important and also give them the chance to mix with people of their own age with similar interests so they can help and support each other during their treatments.
5. How did you find the marathon? Did you hit the wall?
The Marathon was by far the hardest thing I have ever done. Before I started this challenge I had never run before, not even 1 mile. On the day it was very hot and by 15 miles my legs felt really tired and were beginning to cramp. They got worse over the last few miles but I kept running. I’m not sure if I hit the wall – I did see other people who seemed to be a worse state than I was so maybe I didn’t.
6. What kept you going to the finishing line?
The crowds were incredible with their constant support and encouragement. Seeing friends and family on the route was a great motivator. I also knew that so many people had supported me so generously and were sending positive thoughts throughout the race. All of these things helped enormously but the main thing that kept me going was that I had made a promise to Emily and there was no way I was going to break my promise.
7. What was your favourite moment?
It’s funny but I thought that crossing the line would be my favourite but it was more of a relief. I have loads of incredible memories of the day which put together make this a very special day as opposed to any single favourite moment.
8. What did you do to celebrate finishing?
I was so tired at the finish line that I was a bit “out of it” – once I’d managed to collect my things I met up with my family and also Emily and her family – it was wonderful to see her looking so well. We had a big hug and I told her “I did it Emily – I didn’t give up”. It was a special moment.
9. Are you glad that the marathon is over or are you itching for more? Is there going to be a next challenge?
Yes I’m glad it’s over and I had my Steve Redgrave moment where I said never again – but many people have told me they said the same at the time so you never know. As for my next challenge well I’ve had lots of people ask me about that plus quite a few suggestions and invitations !! I am currently thinking hard about what to do but one of the areas which I would like to explore is helping people in less privileges countries to help themselves.
10. Where can people sponsor you?
It’s amazing we still have lots of donations coming in, many from people who I don’t even know. Emily’s story seems to have made a big impact on people which is amazing. It’s been an incredible journey so far and of course Emily needs to keep on doing what she has been doing – Keeping Strong, Keeping Positive and most importantly she must Never Give Up. Thank you to Justgiving for being part of our amazing journey and team. The webpage is www.justgiving.com/simonfoster2
Simon finished the marathon in a very impressive 4 hours and 15 minutes – especially considering how hot it was and the fact that he had not run more than mile before he started his training.
Well done and congratulations to Simon, you are a true inspiration. All of our best wishes to Emily – keep fighting.
We recently got in touch with Catherine Williams, Director of Fundraising and Communications at St Ann’s Hospice, to talk about how they are using social media.
We went to see them last summer to present a workshop on ways to engage supporters through social media – they knew what they wanted to do, and what they needed to do, so it’s exciting to see their strategy borne out with a great deal of success.
Where to start – with a flashmob, of course!
St Ann’s big event every year is the Manchester Midnight Walk, and their PR agency came up with the idea of having a flashmob to promote its launch. People were recruited through a special Twitter account (@FlashMobUK), and invited to join a Facebook group promising Manchester’s biggest flashmob.
Curious as to how the flashmob went? Helpfully, they added a couple of videos of the event (not recorded by them) to the St Ann’s YouTube channel:
Want to see some pictures of the day? Well you can see their flashmob set of photos on their Flickr account:
This is a brilliant example of using free social media sites to help promote an event through to capturing the results of it and building on the impact. They used Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube to share a lot of great content – a large proportion of which was not even created by the charity itself.
What I should stress is that the tools used aren’t important per se, it’s what they’re used for. And they’ve been used extremely effectively here – creating a following, engaging with it, and getting people to act.
What are the results?
The Twitter feed accrued an impressive 742 followers in a very short space of time, and 166 people signed up for the flashmob. Whilst only around 50 turned up, 38% of them were recruited via Facebook and Twitter, and 42% were from the local Student Union.
That’s a very healthy percentage recruited solely through the web – perhaps showing that if the audience can be engaged properly, then it will act. Having said that, this also shows that it’s a good idea to support online promotion with offline promotion – they are by no means mutually exclusive, and can certainly support each other.
The stunt also generated a good amount of PR for the charity and raised awareness of the event, especially with a younger audience. As you can see from the last ‘tweet’ of the flashmob account, they used it to cross-promote the Midnight walk’s own Twitter feed following the launch. Which is in turn promoting the Facebook event (you need to be logged in to Facebook to see it, but they are now driving people to a new fan page)…
And the Facebook event, in turn, promotes the office website where people can register for the walk: www.manchestermidnightwalk.org.uk
Was it successful?
Only 6 weeks into opening registration for the event for the ‘early birds’, St Ann’s already had 1,340 registrants (from a total target of 3,000) for an event that doesn’t take place until June.
That’s 238% more than the end of the early bird registration last year! That’s some achievement.
What did they learn?
We asked Catherine to give some insight into how they’d managed this strategy and sold the concept of using social media internally, as that’s often something that charities tell us they find hard to do:
“I’m a big fan of social networking and could see the benefits for some of our fundraising. Our team of fundraisers could also see the benefits but when their eyes glazed over after I mentioned ‘using Facebook’ for the 100th time, I realised that they just didn’t have the time (and were a little bit scared) to investigate how it could work for their own fundraising. There seemed to be so many options and ideas.
The Justgiving session with Jonathan was so helpful in giving an overview and loads of ideas. Since then, step by step we have introduced some of them for our website and for events – as staff have seen Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, You Tube etc working, they are now actively contributing social media ideas to their own fundraising. If I could give one tip it would be: do one thing now – you don’t need a strategy in place, just try it out! For example, set up a Facebook group/event or a Twitter site and actively promote it on your emails – see what happens as a result!”
All in all, it’s a superb example of many people in a fundraising and communications team using a variety of tools, linking them together to support the distinct user-base each tool serves, and promoting the one event through all of those different avenues.
Thanks to Catherine and St Ann’s Hospice for sharing their success story!
We recently caught up with the Chief Executive of Aspire, Brian Carlin, who let us know how encouraging supporters to use Justgiving has “resulted in a massive increase in the amount of money coming in, and donations have come in more efficiently and considerably earlier than in previous years”.
Here’s a video of their experiences with us:
What does Aspire do?
We’re a national spinal cord injury charity whose projects and services have a very simple goal – to provide the support needed to take those who use them from injury to independence.
Through our projects and programmes, we offer practical support to the 40,000 people living with a spinal cord injury in the UK so that they can lead fulfilled and independent lives in their homes, with their families, in workplaces and leisure time.
Where does your income come from?
Aspire generates £2 million a year. Half of this income is generated from the services provided through our Aspire National Training Centre. The other half is generated by our fundraising team.
How are donations holding up?
Our latest accounts are coming in at just under £2 Million, of which we’re projecting 6.5% for general donations for 2008-2009. This is a drop from previous years, where it was about 8%.
In terms of fundraising income, we are very events-driven: the projection for the year is that almost 40% of our income will come from events. This is why focussing on maximising income from our channel swim is so important – half of all money raised through events is from our channel swim.
How did your big event, the channel swim, come about?
Before joining Aspire 11 years ago, I worked in contract leisure management. Promoting a channel swim was really good for marketing the services, bringing people together with staff and motivated participants, and increasing income for centres.
I thought we could use this for the charity, so we came up with the channel swim as a fundraising event and this is our ninth year. We’ve worked long and hard on it – investing in it, marketing it, and re-branding it this year to make it a success.
This year, part of overall strategy was to maximise the efficiency of receiving donations, so we focused on how we could use Justgiving.
How has promoting Justgiving to participants affected the amounts they’ve raised?
An increased focus on getting our supporters to set up fundraising pages has resulted in a massive increase in the amount of money coming in, and donations have come in more efficiently and considerably earlier than in previous years.
We encouraged everyone to set up fundraising pages for the event – so we sent out more communications giving people instructions on how to build fundraising pages and how to make the most of them.
We’ve raised about £100,000 more than last year on the ninth anniversary of the event. Such a huge increase can’t be attributed to organic growth, and we think a lot of it is down to our strategy with Justgiving, and the great work of our fundraising team to implement that strategy.
If we look at a graph showing the year on year growth of the event from its start, it’s very easy to see the massive increase in funds coming in earlier – over 40 times as much in the first two weeks as the previous year, and even the ‘lowest’ growth is 50% more than last year.
How does this differ to previous years?
Cheques tended to come in with sponsor forms between December and March. Some people had collected cash, and sent that to us, others had paid the money into their account and sent us a cheque. But the point is that money didn’t come to us when it was given to people taking part in the event, it was only once they then sent it on to us that we could bank it.
What was the cost of processing?
We were lucky to have had two volunteers to process Gift Aid, but their work would have to be double-checked by a full-time member of staff. It was a hugely admin-heavy and challenging process.
Now we can avoid tying up staff time in this and we’ve been able to free up a staff member who used to work solely on admin: they can now focus on communications with participants instead of processing paperwork. So we have more time and staff resource to promote the event, engage with people taking part, and encourage them to raise more.
So it’s saved you time?
Yes, we’ve saved a huge amount of admin time, and people time too, which is also a cost. That time saved has already been put to good use – we’ve already reviewed this year’s channel swim, and we’re looking to how it can be improved in 2009 and planning for next year. We’re setting these new targets much earlier than we used to be able to (in March or April) because most of the money has come in and we’ve had time to reflect and review.
Have there been any other benefits to using Justgiving?
An added benefit from an organisational position is the increase in cash flow earlier on in the year – we get more money, much earlier. This is great because, whereas we used to release money from high interest deposit accounts to cover the costs of running the charity, our increased cash flow has covered those costs, and our investments have remained working for us and generating additional money for Aspire.
We have reserves committed to supporting projects in the future, but they are safe earning interest at 6.75%, not covering the running costs of the charity. We received much more than we’d planned and budgeted for, so it’s great that we’ve not had to dip into our reserves to support the event. And for charities facing difficult times, we need to do anything we can to make any cash deposits we have work hard for us.
So the performance of the Channel swim has supported all of your other work?
Yes, it couldn’t have happened in a better year, when we’ve expanded our housing programme and added nine new properties, equipping, furnishing, and adapting them.
We also asked Chris Field, Head of Fundraising and Marketing, a couple of questions about Justgiving:
Does it make a difference that we are a small social enterprise with transparent values, and not a big corporate organisation?
We appreciate being able to communicate readily with all at Justgiving, and it is refreshing to have queries dealt with straight away rather than being passed from one to the next without a conclusive answer. Often the case with larger organisations in my experience…
Also, I was wondering whether you could comment on whether Justgiving’s reputation among donors has had anything to do with your increased success?
We were recently approached by a company offering us the capacity to set up online giving pages in house. Given the amount of online giving pages we have registered with Justgiving (in excess of 2,000 this year) we did give this serious consideration. However, due to both the quality of service offered by Justgiving, as well as the strength of the Justgiving brand, we decided against this. We felt that as we are a small charity, with relatively little brand awareness amongst the general public, that people would feel happier entrusting their credit card details with a company as trustworthy as Justgiving. That’s not to say that we’re not trustworthy! Just a little less well known…
Thanks very much for taking the time to speak to us Brian and Chris. We hope this year’s event is an even bigger success for you and the charity.
Jane’s appeal, the charity set up by the late Jane Tomlinson CBE, has exceeded its £2 million target and set a new goal of raising £5 million.
Jane was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990. Over the following decade she battled the disease but it continued to spread. In 2000 doctors told her she had only months to live but she was determined to not give in. Jane spent the next 7 years fighting cancer with numerous rounds of chemotherapy whilst also taking part in a series of unbelievable challenges.
Jane, a mother of three from Leeds, completed multiple marathons, triathlons, Iron Man contests and many long distance cycle rides, including a tandem ride from Rome to Leeds and a bike ride across America, from San Francisco to New York. She used the events to raise a huge amount of money for charity, and also to show that people diagnosed with a terminal condition can still lead an active and positive life.
Jane was forced to withdraw from competition in 2006 but spent her remaining time building a legacy event – the Leeds 10K ‘Run For All’. It is now a yearly event which attracts over 10,000 participants and aims to raise £500,000 for good causes.
When Jane sadly lost her battle with cancer in 2007, she had already raised over £1.8 million, benefitting many children’s and cancer charities including Macmillan Cancer Relief, SPARKS, Damon Runyon Cancer Research, Yorkshire Cancer Centre, Martin House Hospice, Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice and Hannah House. Jane’s Appeal has now broken its £2 million target, more than 400 times its initial aim.
Jane’s husband, Mike Tomlinson, and their children Suzanne, Rebecca and Steven, are “committed to continuing the work Jane started” and in July 2008 Mike and Rebecca took part in the End2End Cycling Challenge – a 1,300 bike ride from John O’Groats to Land’s End. They also continue to support her “Run For All” legacy, which has proved so successful that there is now a York 10K as well as Junior and Mini Fun Runs starting this year. There are still a few places left if you’d like to join in.
Jane was one of Justgiving’s biggest ever fundraisers and we all continue to be amazed and inspired by her courage and achievements. She has shown what an incredible impact one person can have on so many lives. If you want to support Jane’s Appeal you can either donate to her personal page or directly to the Jane’s Appeal page.
