You can watch a live stream of the great sessions below thanks to Noonan Media. We’ll also be streaming the NFPTweetup from 6pm.

The NFPTweetup is a free event (sponsored by JustGiving and Beautiful World) for charities wanting to meet and learn about how they can use Twitter – we wrote about the last Tweetup here (and shared lists of useful Twitter tools here and there), and you can find out more about tonight’s programme on the NFPTweetup website.

You can follow all the tweets from the NFPTweetup on Scribble live, or below:

Your charity’s JustGiving profile now has a special button on it that look like this:

When one of your supporters clicks on the button it automatically links the event and the charity to the JustGiving page, so they can start fundraising in just a couple of clicks! Link your charity’s JustGiving profile to your website so that your London Marathon fundraisers can start fundraising for you.

This is the first phase of our charity branding project and it allows your supporters to have your charity branded-theme on their fundraising pages. You, or your brand guardian can set this by going into your charity account and editing your charity’s fundraising page theme.

Once you have set it and saved the changes, your new theme will be the default theme for fundraisers creating new pages for your charity. They can still choose an alternative colour theme from our four colour options if they want to.

Here’s the screen you will see when you edit your theme:

As you can see, there are four areas for you to add hex codes to define how your charity’s theme will look: ‘background’, ‘donate button and thermometer fill’, ‘titles and thermometer background’ and ‘thermometer and button text’.

You can also use our own colour picker if you don’t know (or don’t have) any hex colour codes:

This is just the start

We have big plans for you make more of your brand visible across JustGiving so this project won’t start and end with fundraising pages. But fundraising pages are what most people see and how most people raise money on the site so it made sense to start with them.

We’ve kept the changes simple for now and we welcome your feedback which will inform what we do in the future to serve all charities, from the very big, to the very small. We will be sending a survey in a few weeks, so look out for it if you’d like to feedback.

Before you start, we recommend you find out what your exact brand colours are. You will be able to preview what the page looks like before you save it – so you can check that the colours you’ve chosen are easy to read.

Once you’re happy with your new page just save it and in a few minutes everyone creating a new page will be able to see and choose your new theme. Supporters who already have a page set up will be able to choose your new theme by going to their account and editing their page, so be sure to encourage them.

Eight things you should know about Charity Branding

1.       This is the first phase, there will be more developments next year

2.       Fundraising pages that already exist will be unaffected but supporters can choose to change their page theme to your theme if they wish in their JustGiving account

3.       Once you have set your charity theme it will be the default option for all supporters creating a page; they can choose not to use it if they wish

4.       You can currently only create one theme for each charity

5.       Anyone with a login to the charity account can set or change the theme

6.       The colours are up to you, but try to make it attractive and ensure that the text is easy to read

7.       There’s a step by step Charity Branding guide (opens as PDF) to help you

8.       We will be asking for feedback soon – look out for the survey

Ahead of receiving the survey, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below – and if you can send us examples of people using your theme, then even better!

Providing excellent customer support is so important to us, so she’ll be helping our charity team respond to your calls and emails within 24 hours and we’re aiming to get back to your donors and fundraisers within 4 hours once her team has been recruited.

While at LOVEFiLM, she was responsible for driving the customer service team forward to build brand reputation and satisfaction and implemented a series of inspirational changes, giving customer service advisors more responsibilities, better incentives and freedom to become the champion of the customer.

In her own words, “My goal is to make the JustGiving website not only the best place for online fundraising but also to ensure it offers the best support, advice and guidance to donors, fundraisers and charities alike. JustGiving really appealed to me as everyone is so passionate about what the company does, it’s infectious!”.

We monitor very closely the satisfaction of the people we help, so the fact that Rachel helped increase the satisfaction levels of LOVEFiLM customers from 62% to over 93% positive feedback, is one of the many reasons we wanted her to lead our Customer Services team.

In fact, she’s so good, she was a finalist in the National Customer Service Awards in 2008 for UK Customer Services Manager of the Year!

But before she blushes even more, it’s not just about her – our customer service team is currently made up of Axel and Davin for charities, and Jules, Huu, Aaron and another new member, Megan, for your supporters.

Here’s the fundraiser and donor support team – what a knowledgeable and smiley bunch they are!

If you want to contact our customer service teams, or tell your supporters how they can contact us, here are the details you need to know.

For charities, we’re here Monday to Friday from 9am to 6 pm:

charities@justgiving.com and 0845 021 2133 (local rate)

For your supporters on JustGiving, we’re here Monday to Friday from 8am to 8 pm:

help@justgiving.com and 0845 021 21110 (local rate)

He got a great email back from the charity, packed full of JustGiving Tips on how to raise more money – so we got in touch with Caroline Baker and Andrew Cates, their Corporate Liaison & Challenges Coordinator and CEO, to find out how they use our site and online fundraising in general.

What does your charity do?

SOS Children recreates families for orphaned and abandoned children through our children’s villages and helps to prevent child abandonment in the wider community through our outreach support programmes which help to strengthen families to stay together through difficult times.

A typical SOS Children’s Village will comprise 10-15 family houses – in each one, a local, trained woman is an SOS mother to up to 10 children who grow up together as siblings and become a family for life. SOS Mothers are incredibly dedicated women, who may raise 2 generations of children – most of whom will have had a traumatic start in life, as a result of poverty, disease, conflict, abuse, neglect or natural disaster. Depending on local need, the village may also build schools, medical centres, vocational training workshops for the local community.

Our global footprint is vast – we have villages and community outreach programmes in 123 countries. For more information on what we do, please go to our website; http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/

What help and support do you provide your supporters?

We advise supporters – who seek to generate funds for SOS Children through a challenge, event or celebration such as birthday or retirement – that they can do this effectively by creating a JustGiving page. We offer JustGiving tips including the JustGiving Facebook Widget idea to alert the supporter’s network to their activity.

For those supporters who create a JustGiving page before making contact with us, we get in touch and thank them for their pledge of support, and offer further support to maximise the result of their efforts for us.

All supporters have the option for the funds they generate to be earmarked to a specific project and JustGiving facilitated this mechanism by allowing us to tag JustGiving pages with codes that correspond to our projects – its a great incentive for supporters and their sponsors to know how their contribution will make a difference and reassuring for us to be able to explain how we can achieve this.

We also offer comp vests/shirts, fundraising ideas, support at events and plenty of project information, pictures and case studies to illustrate our work and how their support really helps vulnerable children around the world.

Has online fundraising made a difference to you personally?

I’ve always worked in the charity sector – I was previously at Macmillan Cancer Support where I personally raised funds on a couple of occasions using a traditional, offline sponsor form. When I recently decided to do a fundraiser for SOS Children and created a JustGiving page to do this, I really noticed the difference – gaining sponsorship was so much easier online and the time I might have spent seeking sponsorship in person from individuals, I could spend on training for the half marathon!

From the charity point of view, we save so much time not having to process the Gift Aid – so this is more time we can spend on fundraising.

What are the benefits of online fundraising for you?

Online fundraising is very cost effective (perhaps a fortieth of the cost of Direct Mail). Online donors are more generous (average cash gift is over £100 on our website versus £11 in the old Direct Mail days). Online donors come willingly to your website looking to help so they never feel hunted or pushed into giving and our cancellation rates are very low. When someone comes on to your website you know its always a good time for them to think about your work. We get millions of unique online visitors a year: we simply could not have had contact with that many people any other way.

The majority of supporters embrace JustGiving as a means of effectively generating funds. Now and again, supporters query the JustGiving fees and I have always responded that the cost saving to us, balances this out.

Have you raised more using online fundraising methods than offline?

Since giving up Direct Mail in 2004 our UK income has risen from around £1.2m to £6m a year (latest estimate this year). Our committed Direct Debit income has risen from about £400k a year to around £1.7m a year over the same period. The vast majority of the additional income started with online contacts and almost all the new Direct Debits were taken out online. Over this period our fundraising costs have been broadly static, making our costs ratios now very good.

Is there anything in particular that’s worked really well for you (a particular appeal, event or occasion page?)

This year, we were one of two nominated charities for The Adventurists’ ‘Rickshaw Run’ event – where participants were challenged to travel from Shillong to Goa – a journey of 4500km, by Rickshaw – with no support team. A crazy challenge that appealed to a lot of people from all across the globe – most of whom created a JustGiving page and as a result raised over £20,000 for our work in India and Bangladesh.

Image from SOS Children's website

If you had any advice to give to charities about online fundraising what would it be?

- Keep any website(s) technically simple

- Do not be tempted to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies. Concentrate on human visitors and let Search Engines do their job

- Never underestimate the surfers’ time and intelligence. Internet donors read more, think more and give more on average

- To get links to your website, ask your supporters. If you don’t ask you don’t get

Thank you Caroline and Andrew for taking the time to answer our questions, and we’ll make sure Tim keeps training hard for you!

You’ll be able to set the colours of text, background and thermometers for your theme so they reflect your brand. And you will be able to do this in your charity account, using the control panel below:

As you can see, there are four areas for you to add hex codes to define how your charity’s theme will look: ‘background’, ‘donate button and thermometer fill’, ‘titles and thermometer background’ and ‘thermometer and button text’.

You can also use our own colour picker if you don’t know (or don’t have) any hex colour codes:

Remember – your theme will be the default theme for your supporters when they create a page, and they can select another theme it if they want to.

Once you set a theme and people start to use it, if you then change the colours in your theme, it will update all the pages with that theme. So ahead of this being released in the next couple of weeks, you should check if you have a brand colour scheme and be ready to set that up for your supporters on JustGiving.

This will be going live in the next couple of weeks and we’ll announce the news right here on our blog.

Once you’ve set a theme, it will be the default theme for your supporters when they create a fundraising page, or when they decide to select a different theme on the page they already have.

Allowing people to express themselves and have ownership of their fundraising pages is extremely important to them and us. For that reason fundraisers will always be able to choose the theme displayed on their page, whether it be a JustGiving colour scheme or your charity theme. The themes which people have chosen before this branding launches won’t be changed but fundraisers can always change to your charity theme if they want to.

Focus groups we run tell us that people get very attached to their fundraising pages, as the causes and stories are often so personal and emotional. We want them to be (and feel like) they are the ultimate owners of their pages.

We’ll give you some examples of how this will look next week, but you might want to check with your brand team (if you have one) as to what your brand colours are (you will be able to choose a colour from a colour picker, or enter in a hex code).

This feature will be released in early November, so look out for more information, and screenshots of how this will look on the blog next week…

JustGiving’s charity champion, Jonathan Waddingham, along with Bryan Miller, the former Head of Consumer Insight at Cancer Research UK, presented on the subject of “Understanding the new breed of digital donors, and how to maximise your fundraising through their networks”.

They did two sessions, both times to packed rooms, and it’s safe to say there’s a buzz about it from the people who were there, and plenty who’ve seen it already online.

The presentation is on slideshare, and you can see the whole thing, including brand new research into online giving habits by both Cancer Research UK and JustGiving, below:

Yesterday, Zarine (our CEO) and Bela (our main investor) also gave a talk on the unconventional ways we work at JustGiving and how JustGiving started from a vague idea about helping charities use the internet to where it is today. We recorded their interesting take on the business of business and we’ll be sharing it soon.

If you want to follow all the action from the rest of the conference, here’s how to do so on Twitter.

As it was only Howard Lake and I (Jonathan) tweeting from the conference, this was considered newsworthy enough for Bryan Miller to blog. (As you may have read on the blog already, I’m presenting with Bryan this year, and we’ll be sharing case studies and research on the new breed of digital donors).

Fast forward 12 months, and how things have changed.

Take a trip over to fundraising.co.uk and you’ll see a live feed of all tweets tagged with #29thIFC (the official hashtag for the conference) showing no end of people sharing what they’re learning, and discussing it with an online audience:

Howard Lake has even taken the liberty to start a list of people tweeting from the IFC using TweepML, a website which allows you to follow groups of people in one go – handy for following a list of people who you may be interested in. (As an aside, he’s created some other useful lists of tweeters, including those specialising in fundraising ideas, charity social media thinkers and many more) He’s also put together a dashboard to show all the interesting IFC hashtag stats you never knew you needed to know!

If you are going to the IFC, there’s a new Twitter billboard that will show all the hashtagged tweets in real time, blurring the boundaries further between being at an event and taking part that much more.

Time was that if you couldn’t actually go to a conference, you wouldn’t know what happened there. Not any more – you can follow the hashtag stream online and get instant feedback about what people are presenting on – good for people who can’t be there, maybe not so good for the presenters…

Earlier this year I wrote about tweeting at the IoF National Convention (not to bang on about it) and how conferences are a great time to try out Twitter. So if you didn’t listen to me then, maybe you will now.

Still, I have questions: will this be the time that Twitter starts to get recognised by the sceptics who still think that it’s waste of time, or are a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon without really knowing what they’re doing?

Or is this the point at which Twitter starts to become more mainstream and accepted in the sector? Especially for the people who we need buy-in from to focus on Twitter?

Who knows, but either way, Twitter’s sure to be a hot topic this year.

***

If you’re new to Twitter, try reading our Twitter, JustGiving and fundraising – an introduction, and part 1 and part 2 of our round-up of useful Twitter tools from the fourth NFPTweetup.

It was quite an honour for them to cover JustGiving in this section, as the Andrew Davidson Interview usually features the CEOs of huge corporations with world-famous brands.

If you’re curious as to why they set up the business in the first place (to help charities use the internet to raise funds), why we are not a charity (only investors would fund the idea in the first place) and what we do with the profits (re-invest them in the business to make it better) then read the whole story on the Sunday Times website.