new media

When people talk about Facebook in relation to charities, they often ask what the return on investment is. The general perception of social giving via Facebook is that it’s not a great way to raise money, but is fantastic as a communication and community building tool. This is true, but only to a certain extent.

At JustGiving, the UK’s largest online fundraising website, we have found that encouraging and enabling individual charity supporters to share their donations or updates about their fundraising events on Facebook has a great impact on amounts raised – research shows that just one share on Facebook encourages between £1 and £18 in extra donations.

To look to the future and understand the true potential of online fundraising on Facebook, it’s first necessary to look to the past.

In the summer of 2007, Facebook overtook Google to become the biggest source of web traffic to JustGiving, and then at the end of 2008, Facebook started to bring us more traffic than email. In the intervening years, Facebook has continued to grow in importance and become the primary way that people who use JustGiving to raise money for charity tell their friends about their fundraising event and ask for sponsorship.

In 2012 alone, Facebook drove over 1.8 million individual donors to JustGiving, who collectively gave £34 million, of which £5.3 million was donated by people coming to the site from the mobile version of Facebook.

One of the ways we reacted to this growth was by building an application that people could use to donate to charity or sponsor a friend without leaving Facebook – this generated over £250,000 in the first nine months of 2012. Given the continuation of this growth, we expect that by 2015, 50% of donations made through JustGiving will come from Facebook.

In a way, this growth in online fundraising reflects Facebook’s own incredible growth. As of March 2013, it has 1.11 billion monthly active users, of which 751 million users accessed the site through their mobile.

So the prospective audience is huge, and more importantly, hugely engaged. But how do non-profits make the most of it?

To start, organisations that have Facebook pages should make the most of its features and plan an approach that engages their online community.

Advice from Facebook includes setting clear guidelines about what is and isn’t acceptable to post on your wall – this will help when users veer off-topic or post things you don’t approve of. It can also reduce the risk that people will leave negative comments, a fear which puts off many first-time social media users. By having clear guidelines, you can reduce that risk and give yourself the room to ban people who don’t abide by them.

Another useful approach is to create a ‘conversation calendar’ whereby you plan the content you will share on your page in advance. This helps create consistency of communication, as well as making sure that you have a good mix of messaging. Don’t bombard people with messages about campaigns one week and only fundraising events the next – have a rich mix of topics that show the breadth of work your organisation is involved in.

Watch out for Facebook fundraising part two: share more, raise more

In early 2013, eBay’s Sean Milliken put forward mobile giving as a major evolution in donor behavior relevant to non-profits worldwide.

According to Milliken, “the next philanthropic horizon of mobile is here now. In 2013 and beyond, we predict more nonprofit organizations and fundraising professionals will adopt a mobile mindset and engage in mobile-enabled fundraising to tap into a new, growing donor pool.” This deep dive into charities use of digital was a clarion call that chimed with our own mantras on the role technology has to play in growing giving.

JustGiving has spent the last decade innovating to help grow generosity and we have witnessed nothing short of a revolution in the way donors behave. More than £1.5billion has been raised for the 12,000 charities we work with and our social giving services have contributed to the yearly 15% growth in giving through online platforms.

We don’t think it’s possible to underplay the rate that mobile is evolving into a social giving platform. Yet according to data from UK technology champions LASA, 63% of charities are not using mobile apps or do not have a mobile friendly website. So, while many charities are still in the early stages of understanding their impact, giving via mobile platforms is growing at a blistering rate. Almost half of JustGiving’s traffic now comes from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, quadrupling over the past year.

On the day of the London marathon in April 2013, mobile traffic actually outstripped desktop visits to our platform. And in the aftermath of national events like the tragic murder of a soldier in Woolwich earlier this year, we are increasingly seeing donors take to their mobiles to respond spontaneously with donations to a good cause.

Not surprisingly, more than three quarters of this mobile traffic comes from Apple devices – with iPhones dominating and iPads close behind. As well as increasingly accessing our giving platforms via their smartphones, many donors are choosing to give by text. In the UK, our text service, JustTextgiving by Vodafone, has been used by more than 15,000 charities to raise more than £10 million for good causes.

Mobile giving via text and smartphones is enfranchising many smaller organisations wanting to raise cash and capitalise on an increasingly spontaneous nation. It also means that charities now have the technology to take advantage of micro-donations that might previously have been too costly to process. For example, Acorns Children’s Hospice raised £7,500 through JustTextGiving by simply publicising a text code during a football match.

As donors become more comfortable with giving from a mobile device, charities need to ensure their donation processes are optimised for smartphones and tablets or they risk turning the new breed of givers off. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean a massive investment in infrastructure by charities – that’s our job. Our fundraising pages are already optimised for mobile giving and our mobile donation process allows a donor to give with just one touch of their smartphone or tablet.

There are 50 million people out there with a tablet or a smartphone. The potential for charities, big and small, to benefit from this technology is huge.

Are you using mobile to fundraise? Do you believe it’s the future for charitable giving? Weigh in below.

We’re always on the lookout for charities using Facebook in interesting ways to encourage social giving. Here’s a round-up of our top five:

1. Handicap International UK
2. Macmillan Cancer Support
3. Blue Cross UK
4. Meningitis Research
5. War Child UK

Facebook’s Timeline layout provides an area at the top of the page for you to add 255 characters of descriptive text about your organisation. Handicap International UK has made its copy clear and concise so first-time visitors get a real sense of the organisation’s purpose, as well as what content they can expect by liking their page.

Next to its ‘About’ section, it’s clear that Handicap International UK has put a lot of thought into having prominent calls to action on the page, including ‘Donate Now’. With our Giving widget installed, Handicap International UK is able to process online donations on their Facebook Page. You can find out more about installing the widget on your charity’s Facebook Timeline here. It means your supporters will have a better experience as they can donate online without leaving Facebook.

Handicap International UK is also starting to use Facebook’s new hashtag feature. By using the #WorldPopulationDay at the end of their posts, they have ensured that they feature on the hashtag feed relating to that topic, where they can potentially attract new supporters.

The timeline layout enables charities to go back in time and add important events to their organisation’s history. Macmillan Cancer Support has used the Timeline to tell the story of their charity right back to when it was founded in 1911.

Incorporating media assets into your Facebook posts is a sure-fire way to increase engagement with your audience. A recent study by Hubspot revealed that photos on Facebook Pages received 53% more Likes than the average post.

Blue Cross is one charity that knows the power of a good photo – and a cute kitten admittedly! This recent post generated over 238 shares.

Highlighting posts that span the width of your charity’s Facebook Page is a really useful way to encourage social giving if you have a particular message or appeal that you want to stand out and promote to your supporters. The Blue Cross did just this by making their post span the entire width of the page. They posted a message with the image saying thank you to their supporters and asked for text donations, using our free text donation service JustTextGiving by Vodafone.

The cover photo feature is a great way for your charity to have a real impact on visitors to your Facebook Timeline. By using an effective image, Meningitis Research Foundation communicates its focus on ‘research to save lives and inspire hope in its supporters’.

Like Handicap International UK, War Child UK has used the top section of its Timeline to promote key calls to action, including signing up to their monthly e-newsletter. This is a fantastic way to add new names to email databases and ultimately recruit new donors. Check out popular email tools as well, such as dotMailer and Mail Chimp, to find out about their Facebook applications.

Which charities would you put in your Facebook Timeline top five? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

I joined JustGiving three years ago as a product manager and today I’m responsible for the strategy and adoption of our public APIs for charities, agencies and developers. We wanted to give the role a face and let people across the sector know that they can interact with our technology in many exciting, innovative and often unusual ways.

APIs enable the core web services that JustGiving are renowned for. It gives people the ability to create an online fundraising page and pull information and data from our website. As well as charities and independent developers, we work with CRM companies like Salesforce and The Raiser’s Edge, so that third parties can build an application that benefits them.

We understand that not everybody wants to fundraise purely on the JustGiving website alone: people want to use other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and their own websites. In some instances, charities want to control their supporters’ journey as they spend a lot of time and energy building supporters and directing them to their chosen fundraising platform. JustGiving acknowledge this and we have created our APIs to let charities replicate many of our core services, which can be easily controlled through their own site. A number of the UK’s largest charities now use our online fundraising technologies, including Cancer Research UK, Macmillan, Age UK and Mencap.

Charities see our APIs as a means to provide a seamless experience for their supporters and there are numerous benefits in using the technology:

1. You can automatically generate fundraising pages for your supporters for any event type (an organised event, In Memory, their own fundraising).
2. Your fundraisers can kick-start their efforts immediately.
3. You can increase your page activation rate and convert more registrants into active fundraisers.
4. You can reallocate internal resources spent on converting or encouraging fundraisers to create their own page.
5. You can integrate your registration forms, meaning fundraisers stay on your website.
6. You can pre-populate all fundraising pages with personalised content and data such as a targets, stories and images to further push your brand.
7. APIs work for both returning and new JustGiving users.
8. They’re completely free.

JustGiving has been around for over 10 years. In that time it has gained the trust of charities and non-profits and has raised £1 billion for the sector. People fundraising or giving across a variety of devices need to be comfortable that they are donating through a secure online platform, so we place high value on continued innovation. We know that technology moves quickly and it’s vital that JustGiving keep pace so that charities have access to the best tools.

Giving is often a very spontaneous action. Our aim is to make it as easy as possible for people to donate so we can capture that moment of generosity.

I’m extremely excited by the concept of ‘everyday giving’ – bringing an element of philanthropy into the tasks and processes of our everyday lives.

A great example is My Charity Bingo, which adds a fundraising element into bingo – an everyday gaming mechanic that thousands of people play up and down the country.

For their Dryathlon campaign, Cancer Research UK created a microsite using our API technology and an online leaderboard to encourage competition. Using our APIs they were able to receive data in real-time, which they leveraged to award badges for fundraising. Participants could then post these to Facebook, a quirky and fun idea to drive interaction. Everybody who signed up had their own page and at no point did fundraisers have to come to the JustGiving platform to create it, a concept that we are entirely comfortable with.

Want to know more about JustGiving APIs and how they could work for your charity?

• If you know your GET from your PUT, head to our developer portal to find out more.
• If that all sounds a bit technical but you think APIs could be just what your charity needs, read our guide that explains the basics and how to get started.

Our top 100 fundraising pages for the first half of 2013 have collected more than 100,000 online donations between them. That averages out to over 1,000 donations per page!

The top 100 pages aren’t only raising money for large charities – we’ve also found super-successful pages for smaller charities like Abbie’s Army and Woking Hospice. So whether you’re a small charity or a big one, anything’s possible.

Here’s our take on how your charity could get into the top 100.

Work with your corporate connections to create fun company campaigns that can be easily shared throughout the office. It doesn’t have to be a corporate endurance event – dress down Fridays and talent competitions work just as well.

Fact: 14% of the most popular online fundraising pages in 2013 are linked to a company. Check out Visa Europe’s dress-down Friday fundraising and Hiscox’s mountain climbing team. Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research supported the Hiscox team by featuring them heavily on their blog and using great photos and storytelling.

Forget the usual massive organised events – go original instead. Create your own unique fundraising ideas or, better yet, reach out to your supporters who are fundraising ‘off the beaten trail’. Keep an eye on the online fundraising pages where your users have created their own events and make some noise about the best ones.

Fact: 87% of the events linked to the top 100 pages have been created by a person or a charity and these aren’t big organised running events. Some of them are really creative, such as sketching 100 animals in 100 days or running a Peter Rabbit (TM) Easter egg hunt.

If you’ve got fundraising pages with a link to an online community within Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, get involved. Watch the online donations grow and use these community links to feed back on the fundraising appeal and spread the word.

Fact: 11% of our top pages were linked to a community based on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. Spreading the word through these communities really helps the donations grow.

People love to support young people who are going out of their way to make a difference for charity.

Fact: Children and young people have great, creative fundraising ideas and are overrepresented in our top 100 pages. Two excellent examples from our list are teenagers Em and Kate, who raised money for disadvantaged women through a five day famine, and Ella (age 10) and Oliver (age 7) who raised money for the Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Association in memory of their grandfather by creating 1 million virtual cupcakes. The MND Association did a great job of publicising Ella and Oliver, by featuring them on their website, tweeting about them,  and sharing their story on the MND Association Facebook timeline.

Take a look at Ella and Oliver’s video:

How have you helped support your fundraisers? Share your stories below.

In the thirteen years JustGiving has been around, we’ve seen a lot of fads and fashions come and go – remember those throbbing red donate buttons on home pages in the mid-noughties?

The trend that is here to stay is now so obvious that it is almost a cliché: giving has gone social. Each year people are now raising hundreds of millions of pounds, dollars and euros entirely off their own bat, telling their own stories and – almost literally – infecting others to follow suit. Mobile has tipped into the mainstream, fuelling story-telling and social sharing even further. The explosion of choice for fundraisers and donors is matched by a plethora of awesome technologies and tools for charities and non-profits themselves.

And yet, charities and non-profits continue to ask us every day: how does social really work? And does it work for fundraising? What are others doing that’s working well and, most crucially, not so well, so we can learn faster? And how do we convince the risk-averse leaders of our organisation to let us have a go at this?

Those questions show that adopting new tools may well be the easy part for a charity or non-profit going digital. To paraphrase American marketer Seth Godin, it is often our ways of working – the culture in our teams and organisations, in other words – that make all the difference between good and bad.

At JustGiving, we’ve been keenly aware of the impact of social, launching our first blog back in 2005 to share insight and advice with charities and fundraisers. Many hundreds of posts, hundreds of thousands of visits, and over 2 million page views later, we’re now focused on the art of making giving social.

So this blog, in a nutshell, is our invitation to charities and non-profits, and our friends interested in using technology for good, to explore how social giving works and how we can make it better. You’ll find not only how-to tips and step-by-step guides, but also different perspectives from a wide range of voices, aimed at making us do nothing else but sit back and think.

So welcome to ‘We make giving social’. Subscribe, read and enjoy – and do speak up if you agree, or better still, disagree with any of it.

I’m delighted to announce that this September, I will be giving a Masterclass at the 1st annual Fundraising Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark.

I am so excited to form part of this 1st annual Congress and am looking forward to joining colleagues from Denmark and the rest of Europe in making it a great success!

The Congress is due to take place on the 9th and the 10th of September. For more information on the Congress and my Masterclass, which will take a look at the latest trends and innovations in Fundraising, visit the Congress website here.

Last month, 99-year-old Eileen Wilson took to the streets to take part in Martlets Midnight Walk. A great-grandmother of 10, she braved the wind and rain to raise money for Martlets Hospice.

Eileen was pushed around the six mile course in her wheelchair by friends, Marilyn and Roy. Sacrificing a good night’s sleep and home comforts, the trio completed the walk in just under three hours.

It was Eileen’s first time fundraising and she’s already raised £250. You can help Eileen reach her £500 target by donating to her page here. If you’re in the UK, you can also support Eileen by texting EILE99 £5 to 70070 to donate £5.

Here’s what Eileen had to say about her first venture into fundraising.

I’ve always wanted to do something like this for charity and to give something back, but at 99 years of age I never thought I’d be able to.
I think we might have been the last ones to finish but I felt like I had won. And the hot cup of tea at the end tasted like the best I’ve ever had. I feel so privileged to have taken part and really hope that I can do it again next year to celebrate my 100th birthday.
I’m so pleased to have been able to raise money for the Hospice as they do such good work.  I think I have raised £250 so far and it would be lovely if people would sponsor me. People have been making a fuss about my age but I don’t think it matters I just think it shows you’re never too old to do something new.

Hearing about Eileen’s amazing determination has made us think. Is she our oldest ever fundraiser? Do you know anyone older than Eileen who’s done something amazing for charity? If so, we’d love to hear their story. Let us know on Facebook or email us at yourstories@justgiving.com

Eileen at the end of the Midnight Walk

Eileen with friends, Roy and Marilyn.

On 28th October runners from all over the world will be making their way through the historic Georgian streets of Dublin as part of the Airtricity Dublin Marathon.

If you’d like to join them, and do some fundraising too, you’ll be happy to know that JustGiving is now available to Irish charities. This means you can now raise money for your favourite Irish charity right here on JustGiving.

To take part in the Dublin Marathon, sign up here, then set up a JustGiving page and start fundraising for a charity you care about.

Are you an Irish charity? You can now join JustGiving. Get started today

Patrick Bishop, Head of corporate partnerships here at JustGiving, is one of the first people to change something in his local area by using our new crowdfunding tool

Patrick’s a keen tennis player, and the broken nets at his nearest courts in South East London were causing him much frustration. So, he decided to do something about it. Here’s what Patrick had to say.

Tell us about your project.  What made you decide to do something in your community?

I was playing tennis with my wife and getting frustrated because of the terrible quality of the nets.  There were so many holes in them that it was sometimes hard to know whether my serve had gone over or through the nets.

Did you contact the press with your story?

We have an extremely active and popular blog for our area, called Brockley Central, which thousands of locals read and contribute to every week.  It’s a fantastic tool for the community and in a way really acts as part of the glue that brings Brockley together.  I contacted them to see whether they could promote the project, which they happily did.  This generated a lot of discussion and enough donations to fully fund the project.

How has your project been received?

I’ve genuinely been amazed by the response.  Not only did lots of people in the area I didn’t know pledge their donations, it’s also created a lot of discussion.  I’ve received supportive emails from all sorts of people, as well as many suggestions about organising tournaments, getting a ladder going etc.  Even a local business made a generous contribution to the project.

When will people see the results?

Right now!  I ordered the tennis nets as soon as I knew I had met my target.  I then called up the council and someone came round to my house and picked them up.  Magically, the following day, we had 3 brand new, shiny, hole-less tennis nets.

What’s the best thing that’s come out of this?

Lots of things to be honest.  Mainly the fact that a load of people who don’t know each other, but are part of the same community, have come together and helped improve their local area.  Not only have we collectively raised enough money for some nets, but the parks contractor have also given the courts a really good clean.  It’s really such a small thing but it makes a big difference.  It’s not even really about the nets themselves – it’s the knock-on effects of doing something positive, creating discussion and bringing a community together, that I think is the best thing to come out of this.

How about a game now that the nets are up?

For sure!  Come along to our tournament ;)

Patrick did all this using our new crowdfunding tool – a platform that helps ordinary people do extraordinary things.  It’s a simple, effective way for someone to make a positive change in their area – for individuals, groups or entire communities.  If you’ve got an idea, whether it’s bringing a community garden back into bloom, equipping an after-school computer club with new laptops or buying a wheelchair for a disabled neighbour, we’ll help you raise the money to make it happen.

To start a project of your own, please visit www.justgiving.com/projects or we’d love to hear from you at projects@justgiving.com