What charities say about JustGiving
Here’s some of the great feedback we’ve had over the past six months, about the service we provide to charities.
Rob and Gerri Blundell, Director and Treasurer of Trust PA
“As a charity with no staff and funding many of the running costs ourselves, we watch every penny. When I first found out about JustGiving some years ago I was very sceptical as we were and are consistently approached weekly to spend copious quantities of money on all manner of services and products to apparently help us in our charitable aims. Many of these are way over priced and are to my mind creaming off the back of the charity sector in the name of discounted support – NOT.
I can say with 100% confidence that the service provided by JustGiving is proactive, supportive, consistently updated, helpful, fit for purpose and value for money. I wish more organisations would follow their business like, customer service orientated lead. If you know me, you will appreciate that the last two statements are not written lightly. It saves us considerable administration time and effort, which I now consider a valuable tool and asset in our fundraising charity toolbox. I do not like spending any hard earned charity money that I do not have to but consider what we currently pay in fees to JG to be value for money.
We run everything ourselves regarding the admin event marketing and organising – you could say the buck definitely stops here! So the benefit of your service is one of the few services that we rely on and don’t have to chase up every few days to double and treble check things have been done properly.
I think the way that you provide online training is a great help and if on is completely stuck, again one can speak to a nice friendly, helpful, human being on the end of the line. We are normally very pushed for time and its such a benefit to get the correct help when needed.”
Brian Carlin, Chief Executive of Aspire
“JustGiving’s enabled us to raise more. We’ve raised that easier, it’s come in much faster, it’s freed up more administration time for our staff to focus on other activities and that steady increase in income has allowed us to continue to expand our services.
JustGiving has helped us with the channel swim this year probably more than it ever has before because it became the key focus for everyone who took part – we tried to encourage them to set up a JustGiving web page and the results have been remarkable. At this time last year, we’d only raised 273,000 – this year our total has just reached 402,000 so that’s an increase of approximately 50%.
The impact on the charity as a whole has been quite remarkable. The income has come in much faster than it ever has any other year, and the difference that’s made to our organisation’s cash flow has been remarkable. This year we’ve got a major expansion of our housing programme. This demanded about 50,000 of expenditure and through the additional income that’s been generated from the channel swim we’ve been able to hold investments steady whilst we’ve been able to use the ready cash that’s come in early through the channel swim event. In addition to that, we have less demands on us administration-wise in claiming all the Gift Aid because that’s already done for us through JustGiving.
It’s so easy for people to fundraise. They set up a web page, they send an email to all their friends and contacts and before you know it people log on and they make a donation there and then.
So the income comes in, it’s less of a challenge to an individual to go round with a sponsor sheet and we’re seeing the benefits. 273,000 last year, 402,000, and we estimate we’re probably going to hit 450,000 this year before the event finishes. So it’s made a massive difference to us.”
Kate White, Fundraising Director of Leukaemia Research
“I think what sets JustGiving apart is the experience that you offer, expertise within the team and offering fundraisers a personal approach to their fundraising.
We’ve worked with JustGiving now pretty much since the beginning actually. We started way back in 2001/2002. You’ve helped us build microsites for different campaigns like our Banana Army or our big Bikeathon so it’s really developed. And as our sports events have grown, our relationship with Justgiving has grown with that too.
Online fundraising has just been an incredible success for us. We know that people raise more money online. We can’t offer that service to people. What we like about JustGiving is that people can personalise pages which really fits in with our brand ethos in that we want to give people a personal service as well. And a huge benefit of that is Gift Aid reclaim, because as a charity of our size, we just cannot reclaim all the Gift Aid on paper sponsorship forms and we’ve still got a backlog at the moment so that’s a huge benefit for us as well.
What sets JustGiving apart is that you’ve got expertise within the team, great customer service – because that’s really important to us. We know that if someone’s got a problem with a Justgiving page we can just forward them on to your team and we know that it’s going to be dealt with in the correct way.
We’re a friendly, warm charity and that’s what we want to try and portray with our supporters and I think JustGiving have always wanted to give us a personal service as well, and whereas they haven’t just said this is our service, just pick and choose, they’ve actually wanted to listen to what we need and how we might be able to work together to find a solution to that problem, and we really, really appreciate that. At times through our development over the years, where we maybe haven’t had the technology to do certain things ourselves, like branded microsites, JustGiving have been able to offer that to us as well so we really appreciate that personal approach.
We completely trust the service that JustGiving give and for us reputation’s really important so for everyone that we work with, we have to trust that they’re going to give a good service to our donors. We wouldn’t trust JustGiving with all of our donors if we didn’t think you could offer that service.
The service that you offer for fundraisers has changes over time as well and you’ve added things along the way and that’s kept it fresh and interesting – for donors too. It’s really important that JustGiving’s protective of donor data for us – we would not work with an organisation that wanted to sell donor lists. As a personal charity we don’t just want things coming in from all the different charities or companies, and we know our supporters don’t want that as well. So that’s a really important advantage of working with JustGiving.
Our London Bikeathon, which is our flagship event, we have over 6,000 riders and last year 75% of the money was raised through JustGiving online, which really shows how important JustGiving is to us and our fundraisers.”
