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.

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)