The Justgiving Blog

It's the end of the blog as we know it (and we feel fine)

Hello there!

Just to let you know, we've packed up and moved blogs. You can find two brand spanking new Justgiving.com blogs on Typepad- one is for everyone, and the other is more focused for our charity clients. But don't worry- we've also ported over all the archives of this blog, so you won't miss a thing.

Check out our new blogs now:

Here's the main blog: http://justgiving.typepad.com/justgivings_blog/

And here's the charity blog: http://justgiving.typepad.com/charities/

See you on the other blog...

Feeling hot hot hot

My first blog entry:

Well it had to be a picture of some food. Why not? The Daily Mail says you should eat salty food in the heat to make you drink more and not get dehydrated.

Sound advice surely.

A cheesy super noodle, bacon and egg sandwhich would surely hit the spot then...

How else will we stay cool until we get Air Con? Or does anyone else have any better ideas?

Justgiving Justrunning…

It was the JP Morgan chase corporate challenge last night so a team of 7 from JG towers donned trainers and Lycra shorts and headed for Battersea Park for the 5.6k race. Some put in more training than others! Marissa is a keen runner and can often be spotted running around Hyde Park, while Jason’s training was slightly less intense, his mantra being ‘thou shalt not drink for 5 days before the race’!

Here we are pre-race:

Competition was fierce and not because the other 20,000 runners but because our US sisters, Firstgiving, had completed the race in Boston with excellent times last month. So who won? …..Drum roll please.

….And the winners are Firstgiving with 4 runners coming in with and average of 29min.24sec.

Justgiving with 7 runners had an average of 34min.22sec.

The winner of the men’s was Firstgiving’s James with an impressive 24.27

The winner of the women’s was Justgiving’s Marissa with 28mins.

Congratulations to Firstgiving! Here they are celebrating their victory:

And finally... may I suggest Jono wears a size bigger?!

and he wasn't even posing!

...and the wall came down

It was almost like Berlin, but without David Hasselhoff singing about freedom in a glowing jacket.

Meeting room 2 is history, and the office is now that little bit bigger to cope with the slew of new developers and testers that will be starting soon. Obviously any opportunity for wanton damage and graffiti must be seized upon, so here's what was on the wall hours before it was pulled down.

There were some other unpublishable 'works of art' that I'm afraid we just can't share!

The new Online Charity Account

It’s been almost two months since we emailed you about your new charity account so we thought it was about time we gave you an update on how it’s been received so far and the work that is going on at the moment as we push towards a full release.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the new Charity Account is marked as BETA release at the moment, which means this is your first chance to test it whilst we work on resolving some of the outstanding issues.

This is the phase of development in which you test out the new system and give us feedback where things either don’t work as they should or where they don’t work as you’d like them to. It is obviously in everyone’s interest to ensure the accuracy the financial data and usability of the service.

So far over 500 charities have taken the opportunity to create nearly 3,000 reports on the new system and on the whole the improvements we’ve made have been well received.

Users have loved the added ability to search for a fundraising page owner and donation and have also been impressed by the improvements we have made in both quality and quantity of data that is now available.

One good example of this is in the payment report, where before you could export a spreadsheet with around 30 columns you can now create a report with over 70 different pieces of data. These include not only the details of the donor but also the details of the person they sponsored and the event concerned.

From the feedback we have been receiving, people are also taking a real interest in the different levels of reports we are able to provide around event-based fundraising activity. Whilst the majority of you have expressed delight that we can now provide a report that summarises donations to a Fundraiser onto a single line, others such as Event’s managers within fundraising departments are really taking to the Event’s report, which summarises the details of the event onto a single line.

So what is happening now?

It is inevitable that with any new product, there are going to be some creases that need ironing out and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all those of you who have been so helpful to date in reporting bugs and giving feedback.

Whilst we do as much as we can to check the accuracy of the data, it is your work in comparing the data from the new system with that in the old that helps us really capture and resolve a vast number of issues.

Our development team are currently working through the bugs you are reported and evaluating the feedback you are sending us. Special attention is being given to the speed of creating a report, which is something a few people have reported issues with.

Whilst this was not entirely unexpected, as we initially concentrate on accuracy of data and then move onto improving the performance, rest assured we are working hard to speed things up a little bit for you. We hope to release some performance enhancements in the coming days.

Terms and conditions update: can donors dictate how charities spend their donations?

The Asian Tsunami brought the issue of earmarking of funds on the Justgiving site into sharp focus. Many people created Justgiving fundraising pages in aid of the victims of the disaster, largely without the prior knowledge of the charities concerned, and questions were raised from both parties about the correct allocation of these funds. New pages are created every day in which people campaign for a particular cause or appeal, effectively placing an obligation on the charity to allocate the money raised to that particular purpose.

This is why we have amended our terms and conditions to make it clear to our individual users that their chosen recipient charity reserves the right to use the funds raised through our site for its general purposes, not a particular appeal. Charities can of course choose to ‘earmark’ some funds raised through a particular fundraising page to a specific appeal if it so chooses, but this general rule resolves the confusion surrounding this issue.

This information is available to our users in our terms and conditions (which can be found via a link on the bottom of each page on www.justgiving.com). It is also brought to the attention of those who are building a fundraising page. If in doubt, they are invited to call the charity for further information.

Is earmarking a concern for your charity? If you are a charity supporter, do you have view on this issue? Please email us & let us know your thoughts.

Service update: finding a fundraising page gets easier

This month, we made the ‘sponsor a friend’ search box on our home page a little bit smarter. Until now, our search facility only returned Online Fundraising Pages that had been created through our plain-vanilla Justgiving site. In other words, you could only find pages looking like this.

This meant that, if you were visiting our home page to find a fundraising page created via a charity’s branded microsite, such as Marie Curie Cancer Care’s for example, the search would not return any meaningful results. Both our charity members and our individual users were baffled by this, and rightly so, so we went back to the drawing board and changed the logic of our search.

You can now find any Justgiving fundraising page via the ‘sponsor a friend’ search on our home page, regardless of where they were initially created. Take a look for yourself. For instance, if you search for ‘Angus Robb’ on our home page, you’ll find Angus’s page, which was created on Marie Curie’s branded site and clearly displays Marie Curie’s design and colours.

Likewise, when you search for a fundraising page on Marie Curie’s microsite, you can now find all the pages built in aid of the charity, not just those that were created via the main Justgiving site.

All this is designed to help people find their friend’s page as easily and quickly as possible. As Justgiving continues to grow as an online destination for all charity supporters, it made no sense to maintain artificial barriers between the various sites that we power. Thank you to all of you who gave us your (very persistent!) feedback on this. What you asked for made perfect sense, and we hope you are pleased with the results.

If you have any further feedback or suggestions about searches, or any other aspect of our service, please email us.

You’ve got it flaunt it.

So many charities spend money on their websites to help inform their supporters of their work and help their beneficiaries access information. Yet so many of you seem to be missing a vital trick, the Holy Grail… donations! Why? It’s so easy! By adding your Justgiving donate link to your home page people can make that donation easily and quickly without the admin hassle of cheques and postage costs. We collect the gift aid for you and even send the donor a thank you email! The service is there for you so use it!

Here are my favourite top ten charities using our Donate Now links, all of them use a prominent donate button and the donor doesn’t have to spend ages clicking through their sites to donate.

Just remember – the harder it is to make a donation the less likely they are going to make it!

So in no particular order:

Autism Speaks

IndependentAge

Children of China

Save Broomhill Pool

The Foreign Aid Service

Health Unlimited

Mencap

Marine Conservation Society

Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation

Marie Curie

You all have a donate facility with Justgiving so use it and use it wisely!!!

If you think your charity links to Justgiving are better than the above then let us know: molly@justgiving.com

Donate buttons can be found in your charity account area. Justgiving logos can be downloaded here

New office plant!

We are back in the office but it STINKS of wet smelly socks! The smell by my desk is so bad I've had to move to the techie side of the room! I'm now sitting with star trek fans and they keep trying to make me sing Lional Richie's - 'All Night Long' so I can join their band ‘DJCM’ (which I think stands for Dreadful Jingles and Can’t Move but apparently it’s just their initials).

During the flood most of the water landed in my In-tray which happened to have a packet of pumpkin seeds in it…the results were very exciting!

I was so pleased with my new office plant that I gave it some more water in the hope we could all have pumpkin soup in October…sadly my excitement was short lived and they both died over night. (maybe something to do with the lack of soil).

Can anyone suggest a quick fix for smelly carpets? …answers on a postcard please.

We're back on track

Molly's posting soon. Hold your breath....

The ceiling is a little bit yellowish but Old Street Towers is back online. All phone numbers work again.

Call Jonathan now everyone, he wants you to!

Anyway here's the old CS den that was in the temporary office:

Jules likes being on the phone so much that he pretends he's on it even when he's not.

Office Wars. Episode II: Attack of the Phones

We've been getting many many emails from people along the lines of:

"Your phones are engaged!!!"
"Why can't I get through!!!"
"Your mobile is busy!!!"

This is mainly because our telecoms provider is useless.

Today Dom our adventurous and handsome CTO has gone back to the wet offices to bring back phones and to get the lines redirected properly. The number you CAN reach the helpdesk on, whether you be charity or user, is

0845 021 2110 or 0845 021 2133

By ringing this number you'll be put through to the helpdesk den. Or CS den as it is now known. Observe:

Colouring pencils were already here when we moved in to Aldersgate Street.

Helpdesk monkeys + colouring pencils =

None of us are quite sure what 'CS' actually stands for. Theories include 'client slaying', 'counter strike' and 'coffee spilling'.

You can also call Tom Mansel-Pleydell's Happy Playful Helpline on 020 7297 8711. Here's a picture of Tom being happy and playful on it:

Our normal numbers will be working later today apparently. Hurrah!

Office Wars. Episode 1: A Phantom Boiler Menace

So some of you know and some of you don't. Last weekend the boiler in our office building decided to explode, flooding all the offices below it, including us, Greenlight and lava-lamp luvvies Mathmos.

The carpet is wet and stinky, the PC's miraculously survived (my laptop was sodden but still functions) and at the moment we're in our second lot of temporary offices next to Barbican tube.

We like it here because they have plasma TV, free coffee, big fat sofas, Molton Brown soap in the loo and air conditioning. I highly recommend coming for a meeting now because we're here until next week and we have security passes and everything. Swish.

So as promised here's some pictorial evidence of the boiler-centric cyclone that swept away our Old Street palace.

Plastic bags are in this season

That's Molly's bottom half. When she sat here it was normally this wet because she chucked a glass of water on the floor at least 3 times a week.

My business cards had been dripped on for two days. They now have a certain bendy quality to them as you can see.

Yes, that's the colour of the water coming through the ceiling, and no it's not what it looks like. (I mean wee btw.)

A drippy ceiling!

More drips!

Yuck!

So there we have it. Sorry if you haven't got through to us on the phone. The 0845 number on the site works and we're all online.

Part two of the saga to come...

Everything got a bit wet...

...but everything still works and we're soldiering on.

The full story with dramatic photos are coming soon.

Bad Robot Dancing

Jules and Charles are really sorry about this, but the world NEEDS another Peter Crouch tribute...

Clicky

Jonno's World Cup Wonders

Here's Jonno, helpdesk monkey to the stars and also several thousand UK registered charities:

As you can see he not only has a 'Crouchaldinho' t-shirt, but he also has a mini world cup that plays national anthems. He has also decorated his wall as you can see with all his favourite players and pull-outs from the papers.

As our resident 'Statto' here's Jonno's Group Stage World Cup Factoid:

During the 1930 World Cup Final, Argentina and Uruguay were at odds over which type of ball to use. The Argentinians fancied the leather ball while the Uruguayauauan's favourite tipple was made of plastic. To resolve this two balls were used in the final. During the first half, the Argentinian leather ball was used. They were leading 1-0 at half time.

The second half was dominated by Uruguay with their plastic covered ball who eventually ended up winning 4-2.

This was clearly before adidas got involved then...