This is by no means Jenson’s first triathlon – he has been doing them for years as a way to keep fit for racing. This year however, Jenson is doing the London Triathlon, the biggest in the world, with a 1500m swim, a 40km bike ride and a 10km run around the London ExCel centre and he’s hoping to finish in the top 10%!
Jenson’s is raising money for the Make A Wish Foundation, a charity that is close to his heart and of which he is a patron. Jenson hopes to raise as much money as possible, “The kids are so inspirational and hopefully we can raise enough money to fulfill as many of their dreams as possible.” Take a look at his page and help him make as many wishes come true as possible.
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’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.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the London Marathon and we’re all still really impressed by your efforts and how much you’ve raised – and continue to raise. It’s just under £23 million so far and it keeps growing every day. This figure already smashes the total raised last year.
At the moment, it’s 15% more than this time last year and there are still three months of fundraising left. This is a huge amount of money by any standard, and considering the current economic climate, the fundraising that all our London Marathon runners have done is utterly outstanding. Well done.
We had such a great time cheering you guys on and meeting you at the London Marathon Expo. We made a little video and some of you kindly agreed to take part, sharing your fundraising stories and your thoughts about Justgiving. We think it’s really great, and if you fancy finding out what animal you think Justgiving is you should take a look!
We also had a load of competitions (well 5!) for our London Marathon fundraisers and we’re happy to announce that we have the winners. At the Expo we had two drawing competitions, one for the picture that most resembled its owner and one for ’best artistic interpretation’ – we got the whole Justgiving office to vote on their favourite picture and the winner is:
Neil Ruff– Everyone in the office was asked to vote and this is our favourite.
As for ‘picture most like the owner’, we just can’t decide. We’ve narrowed it down to three and now we need you to choose. Cast your vote by commenting on the picture you want to win, and we’ll announce the results on the blog at the end of next week.
Please comments below to vote on our 3 runners up:
‘Best video appearance’ goes to Una Clarke – congratulations Una! If you’ve watched the video I think you’ll agree that her interview in costume is deserving of the prize! She hadn’t set up a page until she met us at our Expo stand so we helped her to set it up there and then. The £25 prize will be one of her first donations so please help raise some more.
The fourth competition was for the best fundraising tip, and we have been blown away by your fundraising ingenuity. It was very hard to pick a winner but Haylee Hibbert stands out because of her cleverness in exploiting the potential of Facebook and the sheer level of detail in the tip she gave. Check out her fabulous Facebook tip and all of the other tips that have been submitted.We are thinking of turning them into a fundraising booklet, let us know if you have any great ideas about what we could do to make sure they are used.
The astute amongst you will remember that we said there were 5 prizes up for grabs and you would be right! The final competition is for the best dressed runner, who will also win a £25 donation to their page. We have had lots of entries but have been asked to extend the competition to allow some people to get their pictures to us. So you’ve got until 22nd May. If you ran the London Marathon in a costume, send a photo in to heather@Justgiving.com.
