Atheist bus campaign enjoys record day on Justgiving

You've seen the bus poster, now buy the Christmas book. "The Atheist's Guide to Christmas", edited by Ariane Sherine, creator of the Atheist Bus Campaign, has been published.

According to Amazon.co.uk, in it "42 atheist celebrities, comedians, scientists and writers give their funny and serious tips for enjoying the Christmas season."

This initiative too has a fundraising element. The full book advance fee and all royalties will go to the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust.

www.amazon.co.uk/Atheists-Guide-Christmas-Ariane-Sherine/dp/0007322615/2...

Just a week or so after I'd raised the possibility of an atheist bus slogan generator, I now find one.

http://www.ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/

It uses, with permission, one of the more famous photos of the atheist bus campaign posters from Jon Worth at atheistbus.org.uk.

Now you can type in your own message, controversial or not.

Here's one I made earlier, which no doubt the PFRA will like. I decided to keep the style of the original - strapline, "now stop complaining", and URL.

Following the success of the British Humanist Association's fundraising appeal, the first buses with the campaign's posters took to the streets today.

In all, 800 buses featuring the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" will run in cities across England, Scotland and Wales, along with 1000 adverts on the London underground and two large LCD screens on Oxford Street.

Photo: copyright 2009 - Jon Worth / British Humanist Association

Justgiving have, as they promised, shared some of the online fundraising lessons they learned from their experience of hosting the Atheist Bus campaign.

In Online fundraising lessons to be learnt from the Atheist Bus campaign, they cover the scale of the awareness raising, donors' countries, and websites that drove the most traffic.

In particular, they noticed that visitors spent a long time (three minutes on average) reading the comments of previous donors. "So if you’re running an appeal", they advise, "one way of increasing engagement is to allow people to have their say by commenting - clearly people donating to this appeal wanted to know what others had written. Having said that, you do need to have a clear policy on what kind of message content is acceptable".

The campaign reached £100,000 this afternoon. Not bad for a £5,500 target.

And, according to Justgiving's Simon Doggett, it was a £2,000 that took the total past £100,000.

My favourite comment from the 64 pages of donor comments?

"Et in terra pax a minibus".

The statisticians at Justgiving keep on sharing.

Here's their latest graph of donations to the atheist bus campaign:

They also point out that the campaign has its own Wikipedia page too.

Just seen the justgiving page have gone there from 'one blog alone' (wasn't expecting that!).

Is this not a restricted fundraising appeal? In which case, won't the British Humanist Association have to spend it all on bus advertising, give back what they don't spend on bus advertising, or contact every donor individually to ask them if they can spend it on something else?

Bus companies must be delighted at the advertising revenue windfall heading their way.

Supporters of Alpha International, whose posters on London buses led to the Atheist bus campaign by the British Humanist Association, have now created their own Justgiving fundraising campaign:

www.justgiving.com/alphaposters

They make no reference to the Atheist bus campaign, but they are clearly influenced by it and its success. Their fundraising total is £100,000, way above the BHA's original £5,500 target, but closer to the Atheist Bus Campaign's current total of £82,720.57.

While the Atheist Bus Campaign is a wonderful example of how quickly and effectively online fundraising campaigns can work (and amid the economic crisis - anyone care to mention 'donor fatigue'?), it has now got out of hand.

Both sides - run the basic poster campaigns you planned but please spend the rest of the cash on something that has a direct and practical charitable impact like cancer care or research.