Justgiving.com charity blog

As I mentioned yesterday, we were lucky to present at this year's 2gether08 festival, and you can now have a look at our lovely shiny slides below...

The 7 year Itch: 7 lessons to avoid digital divorce

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If you're really lazy, our 7 lessons (because JG is 7 years old) are:

1. listen to your users
2. *actually* listen to your users
3. expect criticism
4. be honest & open
5. be open & honest
6. you can't please everyone
7. enable

I should point out that we don't think we are always great at doing all these things, certainly historically. But they are what we have learnt over 7 years, and are lessons we aim to follow, and mostly do follow now.

Most of the slides form the basis for a wider explanation and discussion, so if we ever get time and there's any demand, we might record some commentary for it too.

Both myself (Jonathan) and Simon presented today at the 2gether08 festival - which they describe as:

an extraordinarily rich schedule for July 2-3 in London, when 350 people will be exploring how digital technologies can bring us major new social benefits.

Our talk was entitled The 7 year Itch: 7 lessons to avoid digital divorce (they asked for titles in "creative marketing language", hence it's quite fluffy and we'll probably put it up online in due course, but you can follow some of the other interesting speakers live today through the miracles of internet technology below:

Plus, if you're on twitter, you can follow news from the conference at www.twitter.com/2gether08 or see what people are talking about on summize.

Unfortunately we couldn't stay there all day, but it's great to follow the live streams online and listen in to lots of really interesting people talking about lots of thought provoking stuff.

It’s been a while since the last charity site of the month, but June brings us another gem:

www.iPledge.org.uk

In the words of The Buwan Kothi International Trust, the iPledge site is a "blog that celebrates the efforts and hard work of our many supporters - and reminds everyone that making a donation is not the only way of supporting our activities".

I caught up with Kevin from the Trust who had some very interesting things to say about devolved fundraising, word of mouth marketing and using free web tools.

Read on or download the full story: Download ipledge.doc

What is your charity and what do you do?

In December 2005, friends and relatives of Gilly Mundy and Debbie Quargnolo travelled from the UK to the tiny rural village of Buwan Kothi in Haryana, northern India, to celebrate their wedding. We were all overwhelmed by the warmth and generosity of the welcome from the village and resolved to develop and strengthen links between people in the UK and Haryana.

In March 2006, the Buwan Kothi International Trust was formed to raise funds for projects in Haryana and our major objective was to build a primary school in Buwan Kothi, a task that was given an even greater impetus by Gilly's sudden death in March 2007, aged only 36.

Where did the idea of the iPledge site come from?

We wanted to celebrate the hard work of our many supporters and remind everyone that making a donation is not the only way of supporting our activities. Making a pledge can involve making a difference by taking part in (or organising) a sponsored event, or volunteering some free time, or talking to friends and colleagues about the Trust and what it has achieved so far.

Over the last year, we have managed to raise a considerable sum whilst keeping our costs to a minimum (less than £40 in 2007-08 out of a total of £52K). This has only been possible because of using the internet and e-mail rather than more expensive publicity but also because we have actively encouraged ‘devolved fundraising’, by letting supporters do whatever they can to help, without necessarily organising everything ourselves.

What did you want the iPledge site to achieve?

The iPledge site will hopefully help to encourage supporters to see the charity as belonging not to its trustees but to everyone that gets involved. The charity was the brainchild of a large group of friends with many skills and a variety of different talents and we want to keep that ethos at the forefront of our fundraising activities.

Using a blog enables everyone to see the range of activities that people have pledged to undertake and act as a reminder that each individual supportive action is part of a wider community seeking to help the Trust’s work. And, of course, it has cost us next to nothing to set up!

What sort of feedback have you had?

It’s early days yet but feedback has been very positive. For example, the number of supporters pledging to take part in our fundraising cycle ride in July looks set to top the 26 riders who took part last year (and raised more than £20K between them).

Some of your fundraisers have raised more than others - do you know why some are more successful?

For us, the amount raised is less important than the fact that so many people are willing to make an effort. Some supporters have wider – and wealthier – circles of friends than others, but every penny counts.

As a new and small charity, we also know our profile is nowhere near as high as the big charities, but that donations are nearly always made by families and friends supporting individual efforts, rather than on our name recognition, so the more people pledge to fundraise for us, the better. Building our profile by word of mouth helps to keep our costs to a minimum and make sure that so far, 99.9% of the money we have raise directly supports communities in Haryana.

How has Justgiving helped?

Devolved fundraising involves surrendering a certain amount of overall control, but as a charity we have an obligation to ensure that fundraising undertaken in our name is accountable and transparent. Justgiving provides us with this, because donations come straight to us rather than through each individual fundraiser.

Anyone making a donation can be completely confident that their money goes directly – and promptly – to the Trust. It also helps individual supporters to contact friends and family all over the country and encourage donations without the fuss of asking for cheques or collecting cash.

Was it easy to set up the blog on Blogger?

Setting up a blog on Blogger is very straightforward. Some knowledge of basic HTML is needed for changing from one of Blogger’s basic templates to something like the free template
we used to improve the look of the site, but the basic templates aren’t that bad.

If anyone wants to borrow our idea for their own charity and is struggling, then I’m happy to try and explain to them in more detail how we set up our blog.

Did it take up much time or resource?

Initial set up wasn’t too time-consuming because we had the necessary IT skills amongst our supporters. Maintaining the site is a doddle – it takes a matter of minutes to add new pledges via the Blogger ‘dashboard’ and because the site is accessed via a web browser, requires no special software or programming knowledge. Mainly, it has involved adding a title to a post, some standard wording and pasting in an individual’s Justgiving widget.

**********

Thanks for taking the time to speak to us Kevin, you’ve shared a lot of useful information that other charities can use. The concept of ‘devolved fundraising’ is something we are seeing more and more on Justgiving – as I mentioned recently on the blog with the rise of occasion fundraising.

It’s also a great example of using free tools like Blogger to start some word-of-mouth marketing and generate a *buzz* around a small charity.

We’re making a new adjustment to payment reports so that they download quicker and don’t affect site performance. From the end of July, payment reports will be scheduled and available to download from the Wednesday after we make a payment.

Why are you changing this?

Every time a report was generated, data was retrieved from our database in real time, so when lots of reports were run at the same time our servers were processing huge amounts of data and our site performance was suffering.

As our CTO Dom said in April, we’re in the process of separating our reporting database from the live database so there will be one that deals solely with reporting. So, in future, reports won’t affect general site performance, but it’s a big project and will take some time.

Will we still see how much we’re being paid?

Yes, when we make the payment on a Friday, you’ll still see the summary of what you’re being paid. Depending on your charity’s bank, the money will arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the payment report data will be available on the Wednesday.

What about old payments?

You’ll still be able to see and download reports on all payments made before the end of July at any time. These reports will be generated in real time, unlike the new payment reports which will be pre-generated and ready to download.

We're used to thanking people based on payment reports..

We're aware that this change may affect some processes you have in place, so we'd like to help find out what other reports we could provide to help you more. Just click on the poll below:

<a href ="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/710623/" >What reports could we provide to help you thank your supporters?</a>  <br/> <span style="font-size:9px;"> (<a href ="http://www.polldaddy.com">  surveys</a>)</span>

Is this the last change to reporting now?

We still need to make small changes to the Gift Aid analysis and Gift Aid payment reports over the next month to take into account the changes to Gift Aid and the payment of transitional relief. You can read more about those changes in this riveting blog post (which is strangely the most popular post we’ve ever done…).

I was just making a donation to a fundraising page (nothing to do with me being part of a team that won a certain food competition) and I realised we hadn't announced the little tweaks we recently made to the donation exit screen:

Firstly, we've made it easier to print donation receipts, as many users asked us to include this feature. Of course, for those of us concerned with the environment (shouldn't that be all of us?) this information is also sent by email.

We've also made it easier to spread the word about a fundraising page - on the right you can now promote the page by email, with our hugely popular Facebook application (83,225 installs at the latest count), or with our funky widgets - we're always trying to make it as easy as possible for donors to spread the word about fundraising pages.

Here's the widget for the page, just in case you've forgotten what they are:

Finally, there's a call to action at the bottom for sponsors to create fundraising pages themselves. Of course, it's a bit of a leap from making a donation to starting to fundraise, but that's one thing we are continually trying to find out more about and research.

Last week, we mentioned commissioning an external Excel developer to replicate the column selection and renaming features we no longer support in the Charity Account.

We're pleased to say that our payment report manager is now fully tested and ready for you to use. It’ll help you rename and select the columns you need from the new-style payment reports.

Here's what Maria from Connect - the communication disability network, www.ukconnect.org, had to say:

The charity report manager tool is great. You can simply select the different columns you would like to appear in your own unique report, and then it will automatically add all the donations for you!

It’s fast and easy to use. Thanks Justgiving for making the process easier.

And here’s how to use it:

1) Download or watch our PowerPoint presentation for an easy step-by-step guide to using the files in Excel 2003:

Download justgiving_payment_report_manager_instructions.ppt

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2) As per the instructions, check your macro security setting is at 'medium' and download either the Gift Aid payment report manager file or donation payment report manager file, depending on the type of report you’re working on:

Download justgiving_donation_payment_report_manager.xls

Download justgiving_gift_aid_payment_report_manager.xls

3) Once you’ve downloaded the file and followed our instructions, open a payment report and you'll see a new menu item appears called 'Justgiving' and if you click there, you get an option called 'Format Report':

When you click on that item, the macro in the report manager will reformat your report to include only the columns and new headings you need!

And you'll also get a small calculation in the bottom left-hand corner, showing the total paid to your charity:

For donation payments:

 
For Gift Aid payments:

As this is a file to help you once our data is with you, we might not be able to give you much support once you have downloaded the report manager (the success of it depends a lot on what version of Excel you use and how your machine is set up) so it's important to follow the instructions exactly and bear in mind that:

• you must have the report formatter open before opening the file you've downloaded/saved
• if you change your macro settings, you'll need to close and re-open the file and enable macros
• you’ll need to save a different version of the report manager for different settings
• the donation payment report manager will only work with donation payment reports
• the Gift Aid payment report manager will only work with Gift Aid payment reports
• once you’ve formatted a report,  you won't be able to format it again or undo the formatting

...so always save your file first before formatting!

We’ve tested this in Excel 2003 and 2007 and in Mac Office 2004 - it works in all of them, but for each different version you’ll have to access macro settings and new menu items in a different way. The MS website has great online help resources for all versions of Excel.

If you do have any major issues or feedback, please email charities@justgiving.com.

Lastly, we send some big kudos to Tim from fruitful training, because he built the very easy-to-use Excel file for us, and recently trained a lot of us at Justgiving in how to be much better on Excel - we can't recommend him enough!

Since it's been ages (um, January?) since we last updated our homepage, we've updated it up again to make it look all pretty and easier to use.

Check it out now at www.justgiving.com!

Alternatively you can see the tiny screenshot version below:

I was going to write a bit about why our (talented and handsome) designers Will and Kai had changed the site, but our (equally talented and, er, handsome) Content Editor Sophie has already done that on our main blog.

Read more over there!

**Update 30th June - Sammy Ofer answered the call and donated the funds needed!**

On Friday, we were asked by the Evening Standard to give our views on an article (that we sadly can't link to) bemoaning the lack of corporate donors willing to fund the restoration of the Cutty Sark.

It's over a year since the fire wrecked the ship, and the appeal still needs £3.2 million. As we first reported here, the response to the online fundraising page was (and continues to be) great - the latest donation was made only yesterday to www.justgiving.com/cuttysarkfire

Our point was that you can still mobilise a huge public response if there's a lot of affection and attention on a particular appeal (which happens to a smaller extent with every single fundraising page on the site).

Since you can't actually read the Standard online without subscribing to it's reader service (tsk), there's a screenshot below, and the full unedited version too...

In reply to Tristram Hunt, a huge group of individuals has used the Justgiving website to help the Cutty Sark Trust raise thousands. The civic pride he calls for has been shown in abundance, and continues to grow, online.

Upwards of £50,000 (including Gift Aid) has been raised so far through www.justgiving.com/cuttysarkfire with an average of £35 donated by over 1,200 people. After the fire, the ‘long tail’ of concerned donors rallied online and raised money easily and efficiently.

So far, Justgiving has enabled thousands of people around the world to support the project (almost 20% of donors were from overseas), and by reading their comments on the fundraising page, you can see the emotional connection people all over the globe have with this historic ship.

And it’s this emotional attachment that causes massive online engagement - Justgiving powered a huge viral response from donors (£186K) to Richard Hammond’s car crash and it’s happening again now for the disaster appeals in Burma and China. All these appeals have generated thousands and thousands of pounds because they have caught the public’s attention and affection.

The story is repeated in the US elections – Obama’s war chest is significantly larger than Hilary’s - his is funded by over 1.5 million individual donors, whereas hers is mostly made up of the maximum limits for major donors.

So, whilst looking for a millionaire to fund the shortfall is one option, there are thousands of passionate individuals out there who can be brought together using the internet to raise significant amounts of money for the things that matter to them.

What we felt was most important about the piece is talking about the 'long tail' of donors. The 'long tail' is a phrase coined by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first in an article here and then in a book.

Put simply, it describes how the volume of best selling *things* sold (be it books, or films, or music) can be dwarfed by the total volume of least sold *things*.

Applied to the charity sphere, the concept implies that a large number of people giving small amounts can bring in a greater volume than a few major donors, and it's one that I've seen written about a fair bit recently - here's a  good blog post on the same subject, plus there's a great article from the Sunday Times by Andrew Sullivan about how Obama has mastered 'Facebook politics' and mobilised the political 'long tail'.

Yesterday, we released quite a few text updates to the Charity Account to make it easier to use. We'd had feedback that a lot of the different areas were not as clear as they could be, plus we've re-vamped the whole "Marketing resources" section and re-named it Fundraising resources:

You'll notice when you log-in that it's not just the name of the section that's changed, there's now a Help and training section where you can find out about webinars, our welcome pack and here - the blog!

Plus, we've added a very helpful bit to the Buttons and logos section, so that when you click on the button you want, it gives you the html code you can use on your website that will link to your charity's area on Justgiving:

So if I copy that code (from logging-in as the Demo Charity) into the blog here, I get this:

Clever, huh!

Here's the new-look Fundraising & donations section, where you can create reports on fundraising pages, direct donations and edit thank-you messages:

Plus, there's a re-written Account management area, where you can add new users, change your email address...

...and subscribe to our email alerts, or to our fantastic newsletter:

To see all the new changes though, it's best just to have a look round yourself - there are lots of little things you may notice have been re-written or updated, but it would be a very dull blog post that listed them all...

***Update 5th June - get help on formatting payment reports here***

As we announced last week, the way payment reports are generated has now changed - they are generated much faster, but without column selection and renaming features.

To help you out, we've produced demo reports for both donation and Gift Aid payments that you can download below, as well as all the field definitions:

Download justgiving_payment_reports.xls

We've also commissioned an external developer to replicate the column selection and renaming features we no longer support in a custom Excel file. We hoped that this would be ready today, but we've not finished testing it, so it should be released in the next few days.

Look out for announcements here, and in the Charity Account about that update, as we hope to have something we can give you that will help with the change.

We had to make this change to speed up report generation and improve the site's performance, but we are trying to give you something that will replicate the loss of functionality and help you manage your reports.

***Update 5th June - get help on formatting the reports here***

*Update 29th May - the reports have now changed  - read more*

As a lot of you will know, we've not provided the best of service for payment reports over the last couple of months. They have been available again for over a month, we've said sorry, and now we're trying to make them better again.

Reports will soon be much quicker to generate

So that's good news for those of you who spend a lot of time staring at the Justgiving dog and the dove of data...(trust me, we do know how you feel).

Is there a catch?

Unfortunately, yes. To enable us to generate these reports quicker, and to minimise any effect they may have on the site in general, from Thursday 29th May, you will no longer be able to customise the reports before you generate them.

That means no column selections and no column renaming.

You will only be able to download a report in Excel and CSV with every column selected (apart from two that will no longer be included)*. Just like the ones below:

 Download example_donation_payment_report.xls

**UPDATE 28th May - we now have a Gift Aid report example too**

(The Gift Aid report no longer includes a "message from donor" column, and the "Net Donation minus Estimated VAT" column [BS] has been changed to "Net Gift Aid minus Estimated VAT" so you can add up that column and it will give you the approximate total paid to your charity.)

 Download example_gift_aid_payment_report.xls  

We know that this is going to make some of your lives a bit harder again. So we're trying our best to build something that will replicate the custom functionality in Excel, because this change is going to happen soon...

Since it is *urgent* for us to implement this to ease the strain on our servers from so many reports and ensure we don't have to turn them off, all reports will come like this from Thursday 29th May.

As I said, we are working every day to try and find/build another way of providing the same functionality, and we'll keep you updated on this.

The technical reason

Up to now, we have allowed you to customise the reports to include any number of columns, and column names. This meant that every report was generated on the fly - searching the database for all the info from those select columns.

Now that we will give you a fixed report, we can index the database so that it accesses the information much quicker - more than 50% quicker, in fact.

Are we providing any help?

As above, we're trying as best we can to minimise the work that you will need to do, so watch out for some webinars, videos and help sheets in the next week...

More info on our finance processes can be found here.

*the two columns that will no longer appear in this report are "Gift Aid Payment Reference" and "Gift Aid Payment Reference Date", normally columns BR and BS. They have been taken out as they meant the reports were much slower to download - and since they would only include data 6-8 weeks after a payment report (when Gift Aid is repaid) we thought they were not essential.

Matthew from Cycle India left a comment on a recent post that read:

Just a quick message to say our charity found using Justgiving for our recent Cycle India event was very worthwhile. We raised around £100k for our small charity - www.heal.co.uk

We're now planning another event and will be recommending all cyclists to have a Justgiving page, and only take payments this way.

I was intrigued by this, so got in touch with Matthew to find out a bit more about what they did, and why it was successful.

What does your charity do?

We have a project called the HEAL’s Children Village, where we look after around 200 orphaned or under-privileged children. The children are around 5 – 16 years old and live in  one of 10 bungalows, each with its own ‘house mother’ who takes care of them.

We also fund the Poverty Trap Project which educates children in nearby villages who do have parents but they can’t afford to send their children to school.

We normally get £50k in a year, which can go a long way - everyone who works for the charity are volunteers so almost 99% of all donations gets spent on our projects and we want the money raised from the cycle 2010 event to go to new projects.

What is your event?

Our event is Cycle India, which in January 2008 raised £100K, mainly through Justgiving. We had 22 cyclists, plus some Americans and Indian people joined in. We're planning a new Cycle India 2010 now, for up to 30 cyclists.

Why did you decide to use Justgiving for your event?

I sponsored friends using the service and found it very easy and simple to use. I liked how each fundraising page described where the money was going and showed a personal message by the fundraiser.

 Was it successful and would you use it again?

We raised £25k from the Justgiving pages, so it was only about a quarter of overall revenue. However, we raised around £25k in T-Shirt sponsorship, and Prasad the Founder did a fantastic job on his own with contacts, which made up a big slice.

We also raised £5,500 from registration fees and did a few fundraising parties. So, as far as straight sponsorship it was probably around 50/50 this time. The fundraisers with a Justgiving page significantly raised more.  

[Jonathan's ears prick up...] That's interesting, can you say how much more people raised on Justgiving? Do you know what the percentage is?

I’ve checked through the figures and those that embraced Justgiving did better overall – roughly £1,000 more. But many of these used both methods, such as myself or Prasad  whilst many others, like Debbie, did really well too.

Thanks, what lessons have you learnt for the next event?

I raised around £6k myself and I think it was my ‘polite email reminders’ to friends that helped - including one saying ‘you are the only person who hasn’t sponsored me…’ and within the day everyone had sponsored me!

I will stress/encourage all cyclists to have their own personal page on Justgiving.

How will you be promoting the event and why should people enter?

I have written a blog specifically for it and will be posting all FAQs the cyclists may have so other people can use it to get information and leave comments, which I think will help the cyclists get to know each other before the event.

I'll also use the charity's website and every cyclists will have a link from their fundraising page on the blog, with a ‘top fundraisers’ list to promote competitiveness and motivate the donors.

Do you have any more comments?

Initially we (our treasurer and myself) were very concerned about the charges. But we found we were far better off using Justgiving as it was a very difficult task working out the exact amount of Gift Aid we could claim, and many donors had not left their addresses to claim the Gift Aid.

The treasurer was negative to begin with but is now convinced Justgiving is "the way to go", it’s so "easy" for them on an admin front and they "couldn’t fault the system".

So thanks Matthew for taking the time to fill us in on your experiences,  we hope the Cycle India event in 2010 is even more successful than this year!

And if anyone else has a great fundraising success story they'd like to share, leave a comment below or get in touch.

**Update** here's how the story is told on the Cycle India blog.

In today's Third Sector, there are three stories that need mentioning here - the first is an in depth report into The irresistible rise of online giving, another says Public trust on the increase and there's the call to Forge a lasting relationship with donors on the web.

You need to register on Third Sector to read all three, or you can take in some the highlights below from the in depth report by Helen Barrett, which starts:

Sponsorship websites are reporting record profits, with charities also reaping the benefits. Is it all too good to be true?

She does go on to list a number of reasons why it isn't too good to be true (as you'd expect us to say!):

Small charities that rely on events fundraising achieve significant cost savings through the sites. Online transactions mean cash from supporters is received immediately rather than after the event. The sites pass money to the charity within a week and reclaim Gift Aid on their behalf.

For example, Justgiving's fee - 5 per cent of a donation plus Gift Aid - is taken at the end of the process and from the Gift Aid element, making income virtually risk-free for charities.

The charity examples shown are also familiar:

Helen Yates, chief executive of [Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre], says Justgiving has transformed its control over cash, reduced the cost of processing Gift Aid and liberated staff to do other things.

You can read more about their story in a previous post on How a small charity raised over £237K with Justgiving.

Our Managing Director, Anne-Marie Huby, is also quoted with her thoughts on online giving:

"We are a company, but we put social dividends above long-term profit...
Our users want to be empowered, to organise themselves for the causes they care about and delight in doing so."

In a similar vein to a recent piece another colleague, Tom Mansell, wrote about Social Media in Professional Fundraising, the story continues:

Charities should not underestimate the popularity of social networking tools, says Huby. Late last year, online community Facebook took over from Google as the number one route by which fundraisers and donors arrived at Justgiving. This small fact, she says, is highly indicative of how people are behaving online.

To illustrate that fact, for the period of 12th - 18th May this year, 8% of all visitors to the site came from Facebook compared to 4% from Google. That is a huge change from the same time last year, with Facebook referrers increasing by almost 1000%:

Charities are increasingly adopting these social networking tools to target new donors for popular annual events. St Michael's Hospice in Harrogate, for example, set up a dedicated page on Justgiving for its annual Jailbreak event, which sees local business people locked in prison until they raise enough money to bail themselves out.

The event's dedicated page included a gallery on photo- sharing site Flickr.

You can read more about Flickr on Justgiving here, but Tina Holroyd, head of fundraising at St Michael's Hospice, added:

"The business people that took part were able to email their entire contacts lists with a link to the page, with all the technology in place for an instant donation. And the money arrived on the same day."

The last word is left to Liz Goodey, head of research at the Charities Aid Foundation:

"I don't think there's any more risk with online fundraising than with any other fundraising method. Online fundraising is used instead of knocking on doors with a paper form, not as well as.

There's no evidence to suggest that there are more requests simply because requests are online, and no evidence at all that its popularity is declining."

So are the three stories linked?

Well, online giving keeps growing year after year and so much of our lives (social networking, buying products, reading news, just about everything and anything) takes place online that it's only going to grow further.

The relationships with donors and supporters that begin online (be it through a donation or a charity's website form), or are taken online, can be nurtured and developed using all those things that people use the internet for, and in the places that people go online.

If people have an online *space* that they call their own and if the charity updates them on their work in that *space* or see the fruits of their donations in the charity's *space* then trust and mutually rewarding relationships can follow.

Normally, we don't like to talk *too* much about ourselves on this blog (although you may disagree), but sometimes it's only right and proper. So today, you might have seen a new About us section on the website.

We've redone this area to try and make it clearer to visitors to how the site started and what we do, how the site works, and how we make money.

So the whole thing started with an idea, back in 1999...

...and you can follow a timeline all the way to 2008:

What we've also tried to do is explain to people how our fee works better - both in diagrams and in video:

Justgiving Fees - Explained in Video!

We hope you like it! :-)

But there's more! You can find out what we all look like (if you're brave) and what all we do here. Apparently I'm best described as being about "haikus, puns and marble backed graphs". Which I guess is true if I wear T-shirts like this one...

So if people want to work here, or contact us, they're also well served. We hope it gives all the info you'd need to find out what you want to know about us! 

Back in November 2006, we announced our first big survey of charity clients and we then reported back the findings in December 2006.

This year we held the same survey in February and are only now getting round to telling you what you told us (it's been a very busy last couple of months and we missed the initial deadline for a pre-Christmas survey - oops!).

If you want to see how we compared to last time on 14 KPIs (key point indicators), you can see the presentation slides below. The things to know beforehand are:

• We used an outside agency to do in-depth interviews with a variety of charity clients in November 2006 to identify 14 KPIs that we should measure ourselves against
• All the answers (213) are from charities who had 10 or less fundraising pages at the time of asking (February 2008)
• There were not enough responses from charities with more than 10 fundraising pages to draw any conclusions or provide unbiased results.

| View | Upload your own

Overall, there are a number of things we're doing well, and other things that can still improve. In fact, on average we're scoring 9% higher over all questions than last time.

But according to the Harvard Business Review, we're doing best on The One Number You Need to Grow, which is whether your customers would recommend your service:

That's great, but that doesn't tell the whole story, nor would it if I listed the quotes like below:

I've been so pleased with Justgiving, that I now pay a donation to a small charity I support on the basis that they use the donation to subscribe to Justgiving.

Justgiving makes life so much easier for our supporters and for us which allows us to spend time on what matters.

We try to keep on doing the things well that we undoubtedly do, but we're more interested in areas where we can improve. And the main theme was reporting, with others on getting back to people sooner when they ask us questions:

Help with reconciling gross and net amounts raised per fundraiser in order to simplify record keeping and book keeping!

I am more than satisfied with your service. The only comment I would make is that your accounting reports are very complicated.

So what have we done about all this then?

To try and address these issues, we made the payment report generation easier and more intuitive,  hired another member of staff to work on our helpdesk (the lovely Natalie) and added an estimated costs feature to the charity account.

We're also in the midst of a project to rewrite a lot of the instructions in the account to make it easier to find out how it works, and working on implementing a new helpdesk service that will help us manage your questions better.

But although we've addressed these issues, we didn't plan for the interruption to reports that happened last month - that was not good. And there will be more changes coming to reporting soon too that will help speed up their generation, albeit with less flexibility.

What's the point of telling you this?

What we mean to show by telling you all of this is that we're aiming to be open - we're not perfect, but we're trying to address (and already have, in some cases) those imperfections to help us serve charities as best we can.

Also, well done to Jo, Neil, John, Pam and Natalie who all won Amazon vouchers for taking the time to fill out our survey. OK, it was a while in coming, but it did come in the end, so thanks!

A couple of my colleagues and myself have spent the last two days at the awesome Dreamforce Europe conference, for users of Salesforce.com. If you've not heard of Salesforce before, it's a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that we (and 40,000 + companies in the world) use to manage relationships with our clients.

Now this was not your normal bland, boring conference. Not when the flamboyant CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, is there speaking alongside the likes of Stelios, Peter Gabriel and Jimmy Wales (founder of a little known encyclopaedia website called Wikipedia...) about "The Future of Software" and "The Internet As A Platform For Changing The World".

It was all hugely inspiring stuff and I've come away with lots of ideas of how we can use Salesforce internally to really help the charities who use Justgiving, but also how charities themselves can use Salesforce.  And for this, there is the Salesforce Foundation:

The Salesforce Foundation harnesses the power of product and people to improve the lives of those in need. Using a unique 1/1/1 model—1% Time, 1% Equity, and 1% Product—the Foundation reaches out to the community and increases the effectiveness of non profit organizations so they can better achieve their goals. We call this the Power of Us.

And it's 1% product part that I'd like to focus on - for if you go here you can apply for up to 10 free (or apply for additional) licences, watch a demo, or take a free trial of the service.

Let me repeat that:

If you are a charity, you can get this amazing tool for free.

So if you are a small charity looking to implement a fundraiser/donor relationship tool, it's really a *no-brainer*. We pay for the service, do hugely customised and complicated things and think it is amazing, and you can get all of that for no cost!

Plus, you can work with Salesforce's partners to help you implement it - because a large number of the companies who build custom applications for Salesforce for paying subscribers like us, also donate their time through the "Power of Us" of the Foundation.

So why are we plugging Salesforce?

Well, it would make it easier for us to integrate fundraising and donation data from Justgiving with charities who use Salesforce, since we already use it ourselves. That would enable you to have a 360 degree view of all your (online and offline) fundraising, donor contacts, campaigns, mailing lists, and all the other stuff you do (e.g. finance) online. In one place. In one web browser.

Update **to clarify the above, there is no solid integration yet, it is in discussion**

And, er, it's just brilliant.

But seriously, we see the whole point of Justgiving as a similar service - where Salesforce is "software as a service", we try to be "fundraising as a service". And our future aim is to be even more like the platforms Marc Benioff referenced in his keynote below:

So for more info on the Foundation, go to their site, or visit the non-profit message boards at the Salesforce community pages.

We know that we’ve caused a lot of frustration this month by limiting access to the payment reports. Here with an apology and an explanation is our Chief Technology Officer, Dom Lacey.

So Dom, tell us, what happened?

We noticed that we were starting to get some donation time-out alerts (where donations weren’t being processed because they were taking too long) due to the heavy traffic on the site.

We decided to suspend access to our payment reports temporarily, to create more space on our servers and make sure we could process all donations successfully.

Why did that happen?

The payment reports were pulling data from our database at the same time as the donation data was being written to the database. Due to the fact that more people were running more reports than normal, and the reports themselves were also bigger than normal, there were conflicts between the data that reports were accessing and the new data being created by donations.

So we had to decide whether to report on past donations and lose donations that were being made, or to process all donations and report on them later. We decided on the latter option, as our top priority is always making sure that people can donate to charities.

We have to admit that we didn’t plan ahead here. It hadn’t occurred to us that this year’s earlier marathon would coincide with heavier use of the charity account as charities tied up their year end accounts. It was poor planning from us. We’re really sorry and we’ll learn from it.

What are we doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

We’ve started work on three different projects to ensure this doesn’t happen next year.

1. We’ll pay more attention to the timing of the marathon and make sure reports are available during the end of March/early April.

2. We’ll separate the reporting database from our live database so there won’t be repeat of those data conflicts between reports and donations.

3. We’re re-thinking how we offer reports. We need to look how they are powered, generated and offered to charities. It may be that offering some reports in real time isn’t feasible, but we’re discussing ways of doing this to find the best solution for everyone.

Could you give us an analogy in layman’s terms?

OK, so imagining our database is the engine that drives the website, what we are planning to do is create a separate engine for reporting and - potentially - put it in a quicker, more reliable and more robust car!

Dom, thanks for this explanation. I know you and your team have worked extremely hard to make the best of a bad situation.

Yes, we tried to keep in contact with the charities team and to pass on updates as soon as there was any news.

We’re aware of the frustration we’ve caused to the charities we serve and we are genuinely sorry, as well as being determined to learn from our mistakes and engineer a better solution moving forward.

If you have any questions, please email me at jonathan@justgiving.com

On April 15th, I blogged about Person-to-Person fundraising in reply to a question posed by Peter Deitz of the About Micro Philanthropy blog.

He asked the question, "Is Person-to-Person Fundraising Dead, or Just Getting Started?" and invited people to send in their opinions for him to publish at the end of the month.

If you pop over to his blog now, you'll see he's posted a collection of all the responses.

As well as my answer (yay!), there are some really interesting points made by a wide variety of people.

Go on, take a read, see what people are saying. And feel free to put up your *thoughts* here, or there, or on your own blog. Or, hell, just tell the person sitting next to you. This is person-to-person after all!

I had the pleasure of meeting Peter the other day (I've been visiting our Firstgiving counterparts in Boston to find out more about the US nonprofit scene) and I was really impressed with the vision for his Social Actions project, described in his own words:

Social Actions helps individuals and organizations use social media to plan, implement, and support peer-to-peer social change campaigns.

And that's not really too dissimilar from the original goal of why Anne-Marie and Zarine set up Justgiving - to enable people to join together and raise more money than they thought possible, quickly, easily and efficiently, for the causes they care about.

One of the top queries to our helpdesk recently has been about working out the net total raised by a fundraising page, i.e. the amount raised on a page minus our 5% transaction fee, the VAT on our fee and the debit/credit card fee (see here for more detail).

This used to be quite complicated to work out, requiring you to look at many different donation and Gift Aid payment reports and to do some manual calculation and manipulation of the data we provide.

But that wasn't deliberate on our part, it was only due to the nature of how our finance processes work - for every donation that is eligible for Gift Aid, we pay that in full to the charity straight away and only take our fee from the Gift Aid payment we subsequently make, which can be up to 6-8 weeks after the donation was made.

And if a donation isn't eligible for Gift Aid, we take our fee out of that donation. Our processes can therefore appear fairly complicated because of that difference.

Thankfully, it's not that complicated any more!

We've just released an easy way to see the gross and estimated net donation figures for a fundraising page using the fundraiser quick search function.

Here's how...

When you log-in to the Charity Account, enter the person's name who's page you're looking for in the search box on the first screen as below:

You can then click on the person's name to see a summary of their fundraising:

When you click on "See sponsorship to this page" you will then see a list of all donations, plus the estimated fees charged for each donation, and a total for the page:

You'll notice that, as above, we tell you why these fees are only estimated:

These fees are estimated because we can only calculate the exact fees after we have successfully reclaimed Gift Aid on a donation and paid it to your charity (which can be 6-8 weeks after a Gift Aid claim is made).

And even when we do pay the Gift Aid over, it may not be possible to get an true exact figure for a page: this is because we don't charge VAT on our transaction fee for each donation, the VAT is charged on the total fees per payment we make to you.

So if a payment to you includes donations from more than one fundraising page, the total VAT charged would have to be split per donation, and that may mean small rounding errors occur (but these would be discrepancies of pence, not pounds!).

But this new feature will give you as close as you will get to the exact figure for a page, so if you, or your fundraisers, would like to know exactly how much your charity has received thanks to their fundraising efforts, you can find out in less than a minute!

More information on how our (sometimes straightforward, sometimes complicated) payment processes can be found here, including documents and easy to follow diagrams.

We’re glad to say that you can download your customisable payment reports from your Charity Account again.

***Update, 30th April***

As so many people are now accessing the reports at the same time, they are taking longer than normal to be generated. You should not be experiencing any time-outs, but please be patient when downloading reports or try running them early in the morning or in the late afternoon.

They may take longer, but this will only be for the short term - and you can read how we are planning to improve this in future here.

***End of update***

As you may know, we suspended the ability to download payment reports during the London Marathon peak because our servers couldn't support the heavy website traffic combined with the increased usage of bigger-than-normal reports (due to many charities needing to download lots of reports to close the books at year end) all at the same time.

For this, we are sorry. Really, really sorry. We realise this has caused a lot of frustration for a lot of people and understand that over the last couple of weeks we have not provided the level of service that we normally do.

And that makes us angry. Angry because we care about what we do. We're passionate about helping people raise money online (and all that encompasses) and when we fall short of our reason for being, and our company values, that really frustrates us.

So quite simply, keeping the reports up would have meant people couldn't donate. But the root causes are a bit more complicated, so next week our CTO (up now here) will give you a full and detailed explanation of what happened, our decisions, and what we plan to do to prevent this in future.

And to give you some context for the traffic we had, below is a six-month graph showing the daily reach of Justgiving in comparison to Everyclick and Sport Relief (the most popular charity website according to the latest Hitwise report).
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