On January 1^st the rate of VAT is sadly going back up to 17.5%, and our finance and technical teams are busy making sure we’re ready to change our financial and technical process again. Remember, VAT is charged on our transaction fee and our monthly subscription fee as detailed on the site here.

Payments to charities over Christmas and the New Year

We’re trying to make payments as late as we can in December so that VAT is charged at the lower rate on as many donations as possible. You should note that VAT is charged on our transaction fee when we make a payment to your charity, not when the donation is actually made.

Friday 18^th December – weekly donation payment as usual (covering Wednesday 9^th to Tuesday 15^th inclusive). VAT at 15%

Thursday 24^th December –donation payment covering Wednesday 16^th to Monday 21st December. VAT at 15%

Thursday 31st December –donation payment covering all amounts over £100 up until the end of Monday 28^th December. Last of 2009 Gift Aid payments paid too. VAT at 15%

Friday 8^th January –payment for donations made between 29^th and 31^st December (inclusive). VAT rate at 17.5%.

Friday 15^th January – payment for donations made between 1^st and 11^th January (inclusive). VAT rate at 17.5%.

We hope that this gives you a good idea of when we’re making payments to you over the festive season. Another thing to remember is that it takes 3 working days for our payments to reach your bank account, although it may take longer than usual because of bank holidays over Christmas and the New Year. Not that it isn’t complicated enough already!

If you have any specific questions, please leave them in the comments and we’ll be sure to reply to them.

This Christmas, national DAB radio station Amazing Radio – the first in the world to only play new music from unsigned artists – is donating all of its advertising resources to registered charities.Not only is the station giving slots to charities with existing radio ads, but the Amazing team are also creating commercials for smaller organisations free of charge. The offer runs throughout December until 12th night (6th January), so if you’d like to put your message to Amazing’s 1.5 million listeners, just go to http://amazingradio.co.uk/charities/charities-application-form and fill in the online application form.

Once Amazing Radio have confirmed they’ve received your application, you’ll need to set up a Christmas appeal page on JustGiving. That’s if you haven’t got one already. If you do want to use an existing page, please make sure it’s up to date with photos and a description of what the funds raised will be used for as these are the kind of details that will help increase donations.

Ready to create your page? Click here.

If you haven’t set up an appeal page before, don’t worry, it’s exactly the same process as if you were fundraising for your charity. The only thing to bear in mind is that when you create an account, enter the name of your appeal in the ‘First name’ and ‘Last name’ fields. That way, people will be able to find your appeal if they search for it from the JustGiving homepage.

If you need any help setting up your appeal page you can contact the Charities Helpdesk by e-mailing ‘charites@justgiving.com’ or calling 0845 021 2133. But remember, for any questions about your ad, you’ll have to speak to Amazing Radio directly.

Amazing Radio is broadcast on DAB Digital Radio and simulcast online at amazingradio.co.uk. It plays music exclsuively from its sister company amazingtunes.com, the ethical download site that aims to reinvent the music business by making it fair and offering artists 70% of download revenues. The Sunday Times called it, ‘A revolution, the end of the closed shop’ and The Guardian called it ‘Truly the people’s Station’.

We are now paying Gift Aid within 20 days of each monthly claim, this used to take around two months.

How did we do it?

This year we’ve worked hard to speed up our processes so that charities receive their Gift Aid faster. We looked at every stage of the process to find ways to improve them – and by working closely with our technology development team, we were able to invest in, and deploy, upgrades to our financial systems. In June we halved the turnaround time from 60 to 30 days. The latest development (automating the remittance process) has reduced this even more.

“We’ve reduced the wait time between making a Gift Aid claim and making a payment to less than 20 days for all our member charities. A few weeks ago we would have had to say ‘under 30 days’, six months ago it would have been ‘under 60 days’. This is another example of how constant investment, innovation and a totally committed staff are improving the JustGiving experience”

Our Chief Financial Officer, Neil Bannister

If you’re not sure or want to ask any questions about our Gift Aid payment process, you can contact our Finance Assistant Margarita Theodorou on 0207 067 0982, or on margarita@justgiving.com

We are on the hunt for some keen JustGiving charity users from different backgrounds to help us make the site even better. If this sounds like you then read on…

The people we recruit will be engaging in a dialogue with us at here at JustGiving by providing ongoing charity feedback on our products and priorities. If possible we are looking for people from London and the Home Counties who are able to give up one evening every two or three months to take part in group or one-on-one sessions with us here at JustGiving towers in central London.

If you are not located in these areas don’t worry – we’re also building a list of charity users we can call for the occasional one-on-one discussion screen-sharing phone discussion.

So what do you get for giving up your time to help us? As thanks, you’ll have the opportunity to have ongoing input and insight into JustGiving’s product development, plus receive donations to your charity.

The user sessions will get started in January and if you are interested in applying for a place in this  programme then please fill out this survey.

Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that everyone who applies will be accepted, because we are aiming to get as wide a representation of our charity partner base as possible.

We were a bit surprised by the nomination at first, as we’re obviously not a charity ourselves and we’re up against many of the charities we work with, but here’s what metrixlab, the award organisers had to say:

“Though you are not an NGO, we did list you there since you are working for them on a daily basis and in the end help the world make a better place.”

So there you have it, if you feel inclined to vote for us, please do! Oh, there is an incentive from the organisers too – each vote means you’ll be in with a chance of winning a Samsung 32 Inch HD TV or a Sony PSP Go! games console.

To give you some inspiration, we’ve collected a number of page themes we really liked, and you can see them on the slideshow below (or on Flickr).

If you can’t find your charity’s theme there, please add a link in the comments, or add your own screenshot to our “Charity themes on JustGiving” Flickr group at www.flickr.com/groups/justgivingcharitythemes.

And remember, instructions on setting your own theme can be found here.

Unfortunately, Catherine, the Director of fundraising & communications at St Ann’s Hospice, couldn’t make the day, but we still presented their story, as well as examples of how many different charities are making great use of social media. You can see the slides below:

The key themes of the presentation were that you can affect the bottom line by using social media – it is just another way of communicating with your supporters, so your comms plan needs to take that into account and be (this is the key bit) integrated. And integration needn’t be a difficult thing – it can be as easy as making sure you announce that you’ve uploaded a new YouTube video on Facebook and Twitter, as well as on your own website.

What St Ann’s did best was repeat the same messages on different platforms (taking into account the slight differences of tone and nuance of each website) enabling them to spread their content far and wide. And they weren’t perfect either – they learnt as they went on and weren’t afraid of making the odd mistake.

When we went to see them and show them examples of what other charities were doing with social media back in the summer of 2008, they took those ideas and ran with them – without spending months and months drawing up a long and complicated strategy. As far as most social media is concerned, to participate is to learn. And Catherine’s advice from earlier this year still rings true:

If I could give one tip it would be: do one thing now – you don’t need a strategy in place, just try it out! For example, set up a Facebook group/event or a Twitter site and actively promote it on your emails – see what happens as a result!

To emphasise how far things have come in just over 18 months, we’ve shared our presentation to St Ann’s from July 2008 with some top JustGiving fundraising tips and a walk through 7 ways to engage supporters online. Some of the examples are still relevant, whilst others look quite dated…

The recording should be up for a week, and you can go to the exact point of her interview here.

You’ll learn see information about the age, gender, donation amounts, and key sources for a group of users we surveyed.

Download the slides here: IoF Insights Annual conference 2009 – JustGiving (pdf 1.7 MB)

There were a number of other great presentations on the day, and you can find them all on the great new Insights website: http://insightsig.org

If you’re not familiar with this group, and want to learn more, here are their objectives and principals:

Objectives:

* To further the development of individuals who analyse and interpret data for a living,
* …so that insight and understanding of donor and supporter behaviour is improved.
* Make opportunities for people to meet, as a group, and discuss, share, network and learn from each other.
* To build awareness of analysis and analysts.
* To create understanding of the importance of analysis ( and therefore analysts) and the impact that it (and they) can have.

Key principles:

* Practical (no airy-fairy concepts)
* Forum
* Bottom-line focused
* Mutual trust (some confidential information will be shared)
* Sales-free (strict guidance for suppliers and members in general)

Have Twitter’s 140 character constraints made us any more concise? Surely it has made us think harder about the words we use to convey our meaning in such limited length? For charities, endeavouring to convey their personalities as well as raise their profiles via Twitter, the exact choice of words with which to tweet has become vitally important.

For #charitytuesday this week, JustGiving.com’s Charity Champion, Jonathan Waddingham casts his expert eye over some of the charities tweeting for their causes and identifies just what it is that makes for convincing content.

The real-time web. Where videos, pictures, and words are shared in an instant; transmitted around the world and back. Stories are told and re-told; shared with friends, social networks, professional networks, spammers and bots alike. And they all, ultimately, rest on one thing – words.

Whilst a picture may show the devastating effects of a tsunami, or a video can show you a well being drilled in Africa that you helped fund,  no-one will see them unless you tell them about it. To tell people about it you need to use words.

This is where Twitter has started to change the way so many people communicate. Have we become more concise due to the 140 character constraints? Quite probably. But more importantly than that, we’re now all content writers. Everyone who has a Twitter account is a producer of content.

At the moment, Twitter is only a medium for sharing words. Yes, you can share links to photos, videos, recordings, anything, but sharing a link to them alone isn’t going to get many people to click.

We’ve had blogs for years now and people have talked to each other in social networks and on forums, but never in the quite same format and constrained focus on words that Twitter does.

Since my professional (and personal) interest is in looking at how charities can use the web, I follow a lot of charity accounts on Twitter. Like all things, some are good, some are bad –of course not all Twitter accounts are made equal.

But if you really look at a charity’s Twitter stream, you can tell the ones who really consider the content in their tweets and craft sentences that make best use of the medium’s constraint. You can also tell a lot about an organisation from their tone of voice – and where better to get a tone of voice across than on Twitter.

If you look at the sites for Innocent Drinks, or Green Thing, you get an immediate impression of what sort of organisation they are just by reading the words they use. It’s exactly the same, only magnified to a much larger extent, on Twitter.

So let’s take a look at a few random charity tweets:

“Well done to all of our runners who took part in Run to the Beat yesterday. Photos now on Flickr http://is.gd/3KGHx”

What is the Meningitis Research Foundation saying in those 140 characters? Clearly it values its supporters and thanks them for their efforts. They have photos, so they must’ve been there, and they want to share the experience with people couldn’t be there. It’s inclusive and thankful.

And how’s this for a friendly tone of voice from the Citizenship Foundation:

“Oh dear, our website front page is having style issues. Please bear with us while we resolve the issue. Thank you ”

Every website has issues every now and then – but this isn’t a tweet that “apologises for the inconvenience caused”. It’s human, and you can empathise.

But being human doesn’t mean that a charity has to sound fake, or not mention the cause it exists to support. I love the simplicity of what Kidney Research UK said here:

“Hope everyone is having a good Friday and looking forward to the weekend, hope you’re drinking lots of water to keep those kidneys healthy!”

We all like saying how great Fridays are and how much we’re looking forward to the weekend, but they’ve thrown in some health tips too. It made me think, I best keep drinking water as that’s good for my kidneys – great awareness-raising in one easy tweet.

The advice that they clearly want to give wasn’t forced in by saying something like “you should drink more water to help your kidneys”, it was just added on to the end of a tweet expressing what everyone else thinks on a Friday. A simple, yet extremely effective, example of being human and connecting with the audience whilst still getting an important message across.

So what’s my point? Well, for any brand on Twitter, whether charity or corporate, there’s never been such importance placed on so few words. So we need to appreciate that we are all content writers now, and as such, the skills of writing well (specifically writing well for the web) are becoming ever more important. And how you say something on Twitter is just as important, if not more important, than what you say. It’s your brand, expressed in 140 characters.

Until Twitter puts videos and photos into its stream, we can only use the power of words to get our message across, and those organisations that understand that, appreciate that, and take care of their words, will be the ones that flourish.

****

Visit http://media140.org for more great articles on how the real time web is changing the way many people interact with the internet.