Justgiving.com blog

Charities are spoilt for choice with tools to help them connect with their supporters and raise money more efficiently. And with more platforms, networks and devices to consider than ever before, knowing where to start and where to focus your energy can seem a little daunting. With choice comes complexity, and perhaps a fear that everyone else is doing it better than you. However, the truth is we’re all facing the same challenges and by sharing insights and advice, we can help each other be more effective.

Taking part in this year’s Social Charity study by Visceral Business is one way of doing this. The results will provide insight into the latest trends and act as a useful benchmark for charities keen to see how others are harnessing the power of digital tools and social networks.

We’re inviting UK charities of all sizes to take part in our online survey and help us create a collective understanding of how charities are using social technology to fundraise and engage with supporters in new ways.

The survey is open until 23 August 2013 and we’re looking forward to sharing the results with you in mid-September.

Take a look at the results of the 2012 Social Charity study to find out more.

At JustGiving, we’ve found a way to monetise Facebook by encouraging people to share their actions from our site with their Facebook friends. Specifically, when someone sponsors a friend who’s taking part in a fundraising event we will prompt them to share a link to their friend’s donation page on Facebook.

We recognise that some people don’t like sharing how much they give to charity, or that they give to charity at all, so we ensure our request makes it clear that sharing charitable information is a great way of helping others to raise more money.  After all, sharing is an altruistic act and not a way to show off generosity.

Whilst we promote sharing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and by email, Facebook is by far the most popular option and accounts for 90% of our total shares. This is not entirely surprising given Facebook’s scale compared to the other networks and that most people use Facebook to ask their friends to sponsor them.

Redeveloping our website to encourage and highlight social sharing has had a massive impact on the number of donations made, raising an extra £1 million in eight months. For every share a donor makes to a social network, a certain percentage of their friends will see it, click on it and make another donation with JustGiving. Our data shows that this means each share to Facebook is worth on average an extra £4.50. In contrast, sharing to Twitter is worth £1.80 and LinkedIn £3.30. From September 2011 to April 2012, Facebook sharing generated over £925,000, Twitter £55,000 and LinkedIn £22,000.

What has been fascinating to observe is how the impact of sharing on Facebook changes depending on the context of who is sharing and what they’re sharing. For example, if a donor shares a message on Facebook about them donating directly to a charity, it’s worth £1 per share. And if someone shares a message about donating to a friend’s fundraising page, it’s worth around £5. But if a fundraiser (i.e. someone taking part in a fundraising event for a charity) shares a text update about their event, it is worth around £12 per share. Incredibly, if a fundraiser records and shares a video about their event, the average value per share increases to £18.

In each instance, shared content appears in a Facebook newsfeed in broadly the same way, but the motivation and interest of the messages is totally different. It may be self-evident on reflection that individuals in a social network are more likely to respond to someone doing something for charity than just donating to charity, but the way we built our product and track our data proves that this is actual behaviour. We like to summarise this as ‘the greater the effort of the individual, the greater the response from their network’.

So what does this mean for charities wanting to use Facebook to raise money? Well, it proves that encouraging people to share their charitable actions on Facebook helps to raise more money and that extra care should be taken on how people are encouraged to share.

Most non-profits will have a way of accepting donations online, but very few of those processes actively encourage people to share their donations with friends. Given that each Facebook user has an average of 130 friends, just one share could help to reach people that the charity doesn’t have access to – and messages may also be more effective coming from a friend than from the charity itself.

In addition, non-profits should also encourage people to add more content to their shares, such as why the donor gave to that charity and the story behind their donation. Encouraging donors to share their motivation will make their share on the social network much more interesting and engaging to their friends and increase the impact it has.

To summarise, whether making a donation, signing up to a newsletter or registering for an event, people should be prompted to tell their friends on social networks what they did and equally importantly, why they did it.

Watch out for Facebook fundraising part three: what next for Facebook sharing?

Anyone that completes a marathon deserves a huge pat on the back – I have attempted and failed twice. The training alone is a major commitment – add in a high fundraising target and it’s easy to see why some don’t make it to the start line.

If any of your supporters are about to run a marathon, they’re on course for a major personal achievement. But they’re also probably starting to feel a bit fed up of the training schedule and are running out of fundraising ideas – so now’s the perfect time to give them some encouragement and inspiration.

Over the last 10 years, we’ve been honoured to support marathon runners with their fundraising and be a recognised force for good. Here are our top tips for engaging and motivating them to run and fundraise as well as possible:

People will raise more money online than using paper sponsorship forms. It’s faster and much easier, with less hassle for them and for your charity. What’s more, donating online via credit cards, debit cards and PayPal is more convenient for their sponsors too.

Build a separate database of your marathon runners and send targeted emails that speak specifically to them. Encourage them to send in their stories and reward them by featuring them in social media posts or on your website or blog. Putting them in the spotlight will make them feel valued and motivate them to run that extra mile.

Create a marathon team on JustGiving (here’s one we made earlier) and encourage your runners to join. They’ll love feeling part of a community and appreciate you sharing useful content. Alternatively, you could create a Facebook group or plan fortnightly meet-ups where they can share tips, offer support and help one another.

Forget about your charity and your key messages for a moment. Instead think about the kind of questions your runners are searching for online. What trainers should I wear? What’s the best way to heal blisters quickly? What music will help me keep going when all I want to do is stop? How do I fundraise while training and working a full-time job? Are there marathon training groups in London I can join? If you can provide answers to these types of question, it will ensure a positive sentiment towards your organisation.

Don’t worry if your charity hasn’t got the resource to create new and tailored content for your marathon runners. There’s lots of useful content out there already and you can help your supporters find it. Share links to interesting runner blogs and approach bloggers to write special posts just for your supporters. For example, for this year’s London marathon we asked running experts Phoebe and Nick, from coaching website RunningWithUs, to create training plans and top tips that charities can share with their runners.

Marathon training is intense, so a few well-timed telephone calls to your runners saying “well done” and “keep going” could be the difference between them being one-time fundraisers and loyal, regular supporters.

The best fundraising pages on JustGiving tell a story. Encourage your runners to share their unique fundraising experiences and give them information, photos and videos about your charity so they can let people know why they’re going to the trouble of raising money for you. Explain why your charity deserves support and how their donations will be used. For example £10 will buy a school desk, or £20 will help restore someone’s sight.

Encourage your runners to update their email signatures, business cards and anything else that regularly profiles them with a quick line about their fundraising. The more involved their friends feel in their marathon training, the more likely they are to donate.

Remind your runners to regularly update their social media profiles with training and fundraising progress. Every viral share of a JustGiving page on Facebook is worth an average of £5 in donations!

Around 20% of donations through JustGiving come in after people finish their event, so when you email your runners to congratulate them on crossing the finish line, encourage them to keep on fundraising – it’s a good opportunity for fundraisers to update friends and family on how well they did, as well as make a final appeal for donations.

Have you got any top tips that you’d like to share? Let us know by adding a comment below.

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.

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

If you love using your smartphone, you’ll be happy to know we’ve made donating through it much easier.

A lot more of you are using your mobile phones to donate – by 2014 we think around 70% of you will be using your smartphones to give to your favourite charity.

With this in mind, we’ve simplified our mobile donation process. Now if you save your donation preferences, the next time you donate you can do it with just one touch of your mobile phone. Here’s what Fundraising UK Ltd had to say about our one-touch mobile giving

And if you’re in the UK, we’ll also remember your Gift Aid preferences, making it much simpler to claim Gift Aid on your donations.

Lee Marshall, one of our product managers, explains:

‘The way that people give is changing – more than ever, people want to give wherever and whenever they want, on any device. We’ve looked hard at our donation process and have developed what we believe is the world’s fastest, easiest and smartest way to give to charity.’

Find out more about why we think your little mobile phone is so important and what we’re doing to make using JustGiving on your mobile even easier

There are lots of great cycling events taking place all over the world in the next few months. With so many of you gearing up for a two-wheel challenge, we asked the regular riders among you to share your top tips.

Our Facebook and Twitter timelines were quickly filled with cycling words of wisdom, so thank you to everyone who shared such great advice.

For all of you taking on a cycling challenge, here are our favourite tips.

Training

Dyll Davies – Train hard but make sure you rest at least two to three days a week. Vary your training using something like British Cycling guides, mixing short sharp sessions (e.g. hill repeats) with longer ‘base mile’ rides. If the route you are cycling has hills – and even if it doesn’t! – makes sure you ride up hills in training. And finally build in two to three week taper period at the end of your training where you wind down the intensity to rest you body before your event

Mike Bundy – Mix your training up with speed work, distance and interval training. But tailor it to the event your doing so you don’t get caught out i.e on a steep climb or fast flat sprint.

Nutrition

Sally McSorley – My best advice is nutrition is as important as the training itself, especially when regularly doing long distances. Up your protein intake.

Team work

Mark Baxter – I’m cycling 400 miles from my front door to Paris in July. I’m part of a team and we take it in turns to lead the group – one mile leading and five miles off (there are six of us). We stay tight together and shout okay, slow down or faster. You’ll easy put 2-3 mph on your average speed.

@shudziak5 – Definitely arrange to go on some long rides in a group, it’s safer.

‏@goose1015 – Try to ride with others – It makes distance rides so much more fun. Also ride in all weathers to get used to it.

Preparation

@TAMorris14 – Learn to fix a puncture, take spare inner tubes, have extra layers, water and snacks.

Finally, one thing was undeniable…

Reg Patterson – Padded shorts are a must have.

Steve Dudfield – Main advice would be to get a good pair of shorts!

‏@IanYorath5 – Padded shorts!!!

Good luck to everyone taking on a charity bike ride!

Monday 10th June marks the beginning of Carers Week, an annual awareness campaign that celebrates the 6.5 million unpaid carers in the UK. It recognises the contribution they make to those they care for and to their communities.

Carers Week 2013 is a partnership of seven UK Charities. If you’d like to show your support by making a donation, or by setting up a regular Direct Debit to one of the charities, here’s a list of who’s involved:

Age UK
Carers Trust
Carers UK
Macmillan Cancer Support
Marie Curie Cancer Care
MS Society
Parkinson’s UK

The week is also being supported by:
Independent Age
The Stroke Association
Carewell

We’re all very excited here at JustGiving – and with good reason too! The JustGiving platform is now open to charities in Australia, Hong Kong, Ireland and the United Arab Emirates, making the opportunity to give on JustGiving bigger than ever.

Fundraising on JustGiving

As well as the 12,000 UK registered charities, you can now find and support charities in:

• Australia
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• United Arab Emirates

Once you’ve found the charity you’d like to support, it’s quick and easy to set up a page and start making a difference.

We have all the different tools you need to tell your story and spread the word about your fundraising.

It’s really easy for your supporters too – people can donate from all over the world and there is an option to donate in various currencies including Australian Dollars, Hong Kong Dollars, Euros, and UAE Dirham.

Watch this video to find out more about your JustGiving page -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzrASq_gKbE

Absolutely! Whether your charity is starting out in online fundraising or you’re an experienced digital guru, becoming a member of JustGiving gives you access to the largest giving portal in the world.

Find out more about what’s possible with JustGiving and how to join

At the moment, we’re only able to sign up charities based in a selection of countries. However, we’re always looking to move into new countries, so we’d really appreciate you registering your charity’s details with us. If JustGiving becomes available in your country, you’ll be the first to know!

Register your interest in joining JustGiving

A big thanks to all of you who’ve donated over £23,000 through JustGiving to the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Syria appeal.

The appeal’s now raised over £14 million in total – please donate to support over three million people fleeing their homes who are in desperate need of food, shelter and medical care.

The money raised is helping people like Hassan, who had to flee Syria to Jordan after a bomb landed next to his neighbour’s house. A fragment of shrapnel four inches long had passed through the wall of his house and hit him.

The infection damage means he’ll never walk again. He needs another operation to re-join his severed leg bones – but the £2,600 operation cost is beyond the Jordanian health service which is stretched to breaking point.

Please donate to the DEC Syria appeal to help Hassan and many others like him.

Update – After 21 grueling days, Claire completed her hand-cycle on Monday 14th May. We went along to London’s South Bank to join the crowds and cheer her across the finish line.

Take a look at our photos from the day

Congratulations Claire!

——–

Last year, despite being paralysed from the chest down, Claire Lomas completed the London marathon in a bionic suit and raised more than £220,000 for Spinal Research, a spinal cord repair charity.

And after winning the JustTextGiving by Vodafone Mobile Fundraiser of the Year Award, you’d understand if Claire wanted to take a well-deserved break from grueling physical challenges.

The ride of a lifetime

But Claire has now set herself an equally daring task – The ride of a lifetime. She’s cycling the equivalent of a marathon a day for three weeks on a specially made hand-bike.

Claire had this to say about her new challenge:

‘As soon as I finished the marathon last year I knew I wanted to keep fundraising. I’m looking forward to meeting as many people as I can on the way to raise money, awareness and offer inspiration for them to go and fundraise themselves. Together we can help find a cure for paralysis’.

As well as fundraising, Claire will use the challenge to increase awareness of spinal injuries by cycling to schools, universities and workplaces in over a dozen different counties to give educational and motivational talks.

If you want to show your support for Claire’s amazing 21-day challenge, you can donate by visiting her fundraising page or texting LEGS60 £3 to 70070. All the money raised will go to Spinal Research.

Good luck Claire!

You can help to end slavery in the UK, support the Zoe Challenge

Join actor Tom Lister, Hope for Justice CEO Ben Cooley and a team of cyclists on their epic journey from Riga, Latvia to Southampton, UK.

We are doing this cycle ride because of Zoe. Zoe was trafficked from Latvia into the UK for the purposes of sexual exploitation, where she was repeatedly raped for profit.  After months of investigations, Hope for Justice found and rescued Zoe, and she is now living in freedom.

Join Tom, Ben and the Team – apply for your place!

Cycle one of the stages here in the UK:

29th May 2013: Hull to Leeds (62 miles)

30th May 2013: Leeds to Leicester (110 miles)

31st May 2013:  Leicester to London (125 miles)

1st June 2013:     London to Southampton (95 miles)

The deadline for registering for a place is April 30th.

Don’t miss out, apply for your place today

About Hope for Justice

Hope for Justice exists to rescue victims of human trafficking here in the UK. We believe that freedom is worth the fight and that justice is non-negotiable. We are committed to ending slavery in this nation.

We support victims in the pursuit of legal action against their traffickers and our legal team advocate on their behalf in critical situations. Our Aftercare Coordinator works alongside victims and signposts them to relevant organisations that provide the rehabilitation they so desperately need.

Create your fundraising page for Hope for Justice

All money raised through the Zoe Challenge will be used to help Hope for Justice reach and rescue more hidden victims of human trafficking here in the UK.

Please take a look at our website for further information: www.hopeforjustice.org.uk

This year’s JustGiving Awards gave us the chance to meet some of the best fundraisers in the business – our winners! We asked them to share some wisdom to help other fundraisers gain similar success. Here’s what they had to say.

Plan ahead, like Company of the Year Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners (NLP)

NLP recommends starting your fundraising as early as possible, if you have a deadline. And if you’re fundraising as a company, try brainstorming with colleagues to come up with fundraising ideas. “Our most innovative and creative ideas came from our staff,” they say. Forward thinking paid off for NLP – they raised over £60,000 for a variety of charities chosen by their employees.

Use the code you must, like JustTextGiving by Vodafone Mobile Fundraiser of the Year Claire Lomas

“If you’re doing a fundraising challenge, make sure your JustTextGiving by Vodafone code is visible on your clothing,” says Claire. “It is such a quick and easy way to donate, and 100% goes to the charity.” Claire’s about to start a brand new challenge cycling from London to Paris, and she’s added her text code to her bike.

Make it a team effort, like Endurance Fundraiser of the Year Stuart Block

Stuart says it’s a good idea to do something which involves other people to get them fundraising with you. He used a tandem bike to ensure friends and family could join him for parts of his epic cycle from Johannesburg to London.

Reward your supporters, like Creative Fundraiser of the year Juliana Matthews

Juliana believes in creating something tangible to encourage people to give. She says, “Many people who buy my Happy Bags aren’t interested in where the money is going. What they want is the actual happy bag itself and at £2, everyone can afford them. So they appeal to teenage girls.”

Juliana’s supporters are sent a Happy Bag that contains a marble (for when you lose all of yours), a piece of string (for when you can no longer hold it together), an eraser (so you can rub out your mistakes and start your day again), a teddy bear (so you can always have a hug), a coin (so you will never be broke), a heart (so you always know someone loves you) and a butterfly (because life is beautiful yet fragile). If you decide to give something away in exchange for a donation, do remind your donors that they can’t tick the GiftAid box!

Get the media involved, like Outstanding Commitment to Fundraising award winner Alice Halstead

Alice says it pays to tell the press what you’re doing. “Make sure your fundraising story is out in the public and people who are touched by your story or the charity you have chosen are more likely to donate.” Alice’s story is truly inspirational – after being diagnosed with a unique form of diabetes, her wish to see the Lion King was granted by Rays of Sunshine Children’s Charity. This was the catalyst for her to start fundraising for the organisation, which grants wishes for seriously ill children. So far, her efforts have raised £50,000 for the cause.

Put the ‘fun’ in fundraising, like Cancer Research UK’s Dryathlon, Best Use of Technology award winner

This year’s Best Use of Technology award went to Dryathlon™, a successful fundraising campaign that challenged social drinkers to give up alcohol for January, to raise money for Cancer Research UK. “We used virtual rewards in the form of badges and trophies to encourage fundraisers,” says Ed Cervantes-Watson, from Cancer Research UK. If you’re not quite this tech savvy, try organising a sweepstake around your event or ask your supporters to guess the number of sweets in a jar in exchange for a donation.

Be passionate, like Charity of the Year Nowzad

Nowzad is the brainchild of ex-marine Pen Farthing, who was horrified by the condition and treatment of the local animals upon his arrival in Afghanistan in 2006.  Today, Pen and his team operate the first and only officially recognized animal shelter in Afghanistan. Pen says it’s key to share your passion for your cause with your supporters. He says, “Make sure your target donors know WHY you are willing to run, walk, bake, climb, eat, talk or trek for the charity of your choice – your donors will be more willing to support your noble efforts if they can connect with your reason for making a difference. Supporters NEED to know why they should feel inclined to donate!’ Nowzad certainly know how to do that – they inspired thousands of you to vote for them to be this year’s winner.

Always keep it personal, like Special Recognition Award winner Barbara Walmsley

Barbara has been fundraising for Oxfam GB for 27 years, raising hundreds of thousands of pounds in the process. She says, “Without a doubt my top tip would be to make sure you contact people personally. There is no substitute for topping and tailing your appeal letter or e-mail, visiting your sponsors if you possibly can, sending a thank you acknowledgement and keeping a careful record of donors details for next year if it is an ongoing thing.”