The Justgiving Facebook app can be seen at http://apps.new.facebook.com/justgiving and it allows people to promote their Justgiving fundraising pages on Facebook. It shows an update of how much money has been raised and the last five donations:

We released the first UK fundraising application soon after the Facebook application platform was announced and it has proved extremely popular over the last 12 months...

Facebook - it's bigger than Google (for us)

It's not only from our application that people come to Justgiving from Facebook - over the last year, Facebook has grown to be the biggest referrer to Justgiving - with 1,327,288 referrals (number of times someone has come to Justgiving from Facebook).

Here's the number of Facebook referrals over the last year compared with google.co.uk and google.com:

You can see that February 2008 was the first time Facebook overtook Google, up to a peak in April when Facebook accounted for 50% more than Google. This is obviously due to the London Marathon taking place at that time, and shows how many people were using Facebook to promote their online fundraising.

How popular is the Justgiving Facebook application?

The Justgiving Facebook application at its peak had been installed 106,150 times.

That makes an average of 290 installs a day, or 12 every hour since it was released.

See for yourself on the adonomics site - although the numbers have gone down in the last few days as the new Facebook interface appears to make it harder to promote your favourite applications :-(

What percentage of traffic to Justgiving comes from Facebook?

If we take another graph back even further, to January 2007, and look at the percentage of referrals to Justgiving, it's very clear how quickly the online landscape has changed (as previously referred to by Hitwise) - Facebook has grown extremely quickly into a preferred means of fundraising communications for UK users:

At it's peak one in five people who came to Justgiving, came from Facebook.

What's also really interesting, is what areas on Facebook people are coming to Justgiving from:

People's profiles are clearly the most popular (due in large part to the application) but it's interesting that the next biggest referrer is groups - I've been invited to loads of groups created by my friends where they promote their fundraising activity and Justgiving page.

This clearly works very well, and also builds a mini community of fundraiser and supporters in one place. And that's one of the things that the internet is amazing at - enabling you to communicate and create a community with your friends and family to support you raising money and awareness for the causes you care about.

Think Facebook is marginal when it comes to fundraising online? You'd best think again.

If you're not sure (or can't remember) what they are, it's basically a mini version of a fundraising page that can be posted almost anywhere on the web - fundraising progress is automatically updated and it shows the three most recent donor comments. Click on "share this page" on any fundraising page to find out how to add one

Here's the widget for Will Young's fundraising page:

And here's a screenshot of one at www.qhotels.co.uk/hikinghoteliers

A quick history lesson

Justgiving was the first service to offer a UK fundraising widget powered by an RSS feed back in January 2007 (the old widget, left), prior to this flash version being released on July 24th last year.

Now for some stats...

It's quite hard to get some accurate stats for how many new widgets are out there, but the old widget has generated a whopping 6,895,915 page impressions over the last 12 months.

The high number is mainly due to widgets being posted on a few high traffic sites like two (over here and over there) very popular sites for fans of Jonas Armstrong (!). But in that time, there have been nearly 20,000 old widgets out in the wild, and we estimate that there are many more new widgets.

**Update 25th July - the pages on Justgiving where people access the widget code have been viewed well over 40,000 times, and it's fair to say that a large proportion of them actually used the widget - which is then seen by thousands more (the Dan Radcliffe fan site is one of our top referrers because of the widget there).**

Taking the percentage of page impressions due to the old widget over the past year and applying it to last week for the new widget, we reckon that widgets were on web pages viewed around 150,000 times in the last week.

What we can't track (yet)

How many donations have come via widgets. This would be great to know, but it's hard enough to track (reliably) the number of widgets on the web and how many times they are being seen as it is. That's one for widget 3.0 I'm afraid...

It was a real birthday, we even made bought a cake

Yes, to celebrate this birthday, myself and our analyst John, mixed two of our favourite things (the internet & cake) to make this lovely widget cake -  or *widgecake* as we have coined it:

Now that's what I call an RSS feed [groan].

Chris says, "We set a video launch target of £500 expecting it to take a few weeks to reach and hit it in 48 hours. We are now targeting £2,000." (Wow!)

You can see their fundraising page here: www.justgiving.com/rockstar

It even features on Nickleback’s own website! [Ed - this is how they remind me...]

This page really highlights the potential of fundraising pages; you can use them for any idea you come up with and so can your supporters. Using YouTube and Flickr is quick and easy and makes the page more interesting with video and more photos.

Chris kindly took some time out to answer a few questions about this marvellous idea…

What is your charity and what do they do?

The Rona Trust is a sail training charity based on the south coast of England. We aim to provide through sea training, opportunities for young people to acquire those attributes of a seaman, namely a sense of responsibility, resourcefulness and teamwork.

Where did the fundraising idea come from?

On the second day of a standard sail training voyage, the one CD of music we had was playing for the fourth time and Dean said we should reshoot the video... (and so the idea of fundraising using a music video was born!)

What did you want the page to achieve?

We want to raise enough money to replace the computer systems the project uses to run everything from, anything left over can then go to help fund the sail training voyages.

What sort of feedback have you had?

People love the video and find it’s really easy to donate via the page.

How has Justgiving helped?

Justgiving has helped shorten the time it takes to get people to give money, as soon as they see the video they can open their wallet and donate straight onto your site.

Did it take up much time or resource?

The video took five days to film, and was edited in the evenings during that time. The Justgiving page was really easy to get going and add the video and photos to.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A big thank you to all the crew that helped make it happen: Darren, Robin, Chris, James, Dean, Dan, Jo, Hazel, Lucinda, Jim, Lewis, Ashley, Rob, Cat, Liam, Rob, Marc, Ed, Katy, Rochelle, Matt and Jon-Joe.

Well done guys and good luck for reaching that £2000 target!

Want some inspiration? We’ve made a slide show bringing together ideas from fundraisers and charities who have done their own creative fundraising. Access it here - the embedding feature on Slideshare doesn't seem to be working :-(

Do you have an unusual and exciting fundraising story you’d like to share? If so please leave a comment or contact us.

I would like to express my warm appreciation of the help our Diocesan charity has had from Gemma Randall on your helpdesk. We had an unusual set of tasks that we needed her help with, requests deriving from the peculiar structure of a Catholic Diocese as a single charity with different sub-agencies and “branches”.

Many IT organisations would have said “No, we’re simply not set up to be able to do that, you’ll just have to set up a completely new page and pay all over again”. Gemma has been patient, understanding, creative, and keen to help, and I feel we have had genuine personal service, which is an increasingly rare commodity.

And we raised a goodly amount of money !

All blessings to all your staff and on your excellent work.

Brin Dunsire - Funding Adviser, Diocese of Northampton

As someone who has the pleasure of sitting next to Gemma, I couldn't agree more (she just brought me a lovely cup of tea, which helps). Thanks Brin for the feedback and allowing us to publish it :-)

Here's Gemma is with Kai (and an interesting spelling of Justgiving) from our flickr stream:

We're really proud of the fact that we have real people (who are passionate, knowledgeable and articulate) at the end of a phone or email to help - providing the best customer service we can is one of the most important parts of our service.

As well as Gemma, there's also Liz and Natalie who woman our charities helpdesk on 0845 021 2133 and charities@justgiving.com

I should also add that Jules, Huu and Mike man (sometimes dressed as fish) our fundraiser/donor helpdesk on 0845 021 2110 and help@justgiving.net - if any of your charity's supporters need help, these are the people to call.

These helpful guys and gals are here Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm and can help with all things Justgiving related, and sometimes things entirely unrelated to Justgiving - the other day I heard Mike explaining how the BCC email field works to a fundraising page owner...

Due to some tech gremlins at the convention, Tom wasn't actually able to show his slides, but still gave a typically charismatic and informative talk. I was there, trust me :-)

Actually, don't take my word for it, read what Sara Gaines of the Guardian wrote about it in a piece entitled Charities urged to harness social media. It starts...

Charities are having to cope with a fundamental shift in power as unnofficial advocates launch appeals and bring in donors through social media, a fundraising expert said today

But here (a day late) are those slides:

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And yes, Tom was (is) that *expert*. But the debate about social media and charities is certainly raging today. Over on the Intelligent Giving blog, Adam Rothwell writes an interesting and (typically) thought-provoking post entitled The internet: charities still don't get it.

Indeed, "the near-unrelenting terribleness of the charity’s world’s blogosphere" as he puts it, is something that's featured (from a different angle) in this week's Third Sector.

They asked Chris Arnold, Third Sector columnist and executive creative director of ethical marketing agency Feel, to rate four prominent charity sector blogs (this one, that one, the one over there and the one that used to be here but now isn't)

Personally, I'll leave all that to Technorati, but he also goes on to say...

A good blog has to come from an individual. The beauty of a blog is being able to read one person's views. I hate corporate blogs - they always sound as if they are written by the PR department. They are so fake, and they feel like a cheap sales pitch.

Ouch. Note to *corporate* blog self - must stop those cheap sales pitches (this is the point when our imaginary PR dept steps in and tells me to cut that bit out)...

Moving swiftly on, over on the Charity Place, fundraising consultant Rachel Beer asks Is this the tipping point for UK charities’ adoption of social media?

Besides being nice about my one man mission to twitter updates from the convention (you're welcome), she wanted to see whether social media would be high up on the agenda for charities:

I’m only hoping that enough charities will have attended at least one seminar where social media was on the agenda during the Convention, and that this will have opened the UK sector’s eyes up to the potential of these platforms and removed some of the barriers in people’s minds about giving them a try.

As Adam also said,

The web allows charities to communicate more effectively than ever. But many seem keen to pass up this opportunity.

So the question is then, how do charities get involved in social media? The first place I'd go is Beth Kanter's blog, since her blog tagline is "Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media" and she's working on a project called We Are Media with NTEN, which is described as

a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world

Very interesting stuff, well worth a read (and participation).

Ok, so this post has gone pretty long now, but there are so many questions about how subject of social media can be got out to those reluctant (or too busy) to listen that it's hard not to go on.

From my own personal experience, I'd say it depends on someone *evangelising* the concept of social media and demonstrating examples of its use - that's how people got me into social media and the amazing world of the internet.

Even an old-fashioned email (like my attempt to explain twitter to some JG-ers: Download tweeting_from_the_iof_national_convention.htm) can get others enthused to learn and be a starting point for a wider conversation.

I mean, can you remember the first time someone told you about this new thing called the *internet* or *electronic mail*? Aren't we just repeating those same conversations but with a different subject?

If you're also at the Institute of Fundraising National Convention, pop over to stand 16 and say hi. We've got free cake, free sweets and lots of fizzy pop.

Actually, we haven't got any of them, but we'd love to say hi and give you one of our lovely shiny Moo MiniCards - check the picture of our, er, really exciting (and oddly pink hued) table below...

Oh, I nearly forgot the blatant plug for one of our own Justgivers, Tom, who's giving a talk called Social Media: Join in or Miss Out on Wednesday morning. Be sure to check it out, he's very good :-)

As an aside, I'll be using twitter to post updates from the conference when I'm there. You can follow my updates here, or see what a few other people are saying on summize here.

[Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging service, and a great introduction to it can be found on the awesome Tara Hunt's blog here, or check out one of the always-amazing videos on Commoncraft]

The 7 year Itch: 7 lessons to avoid digital divorce

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If you're really lazy, our 7 lessons (because JG is 7 years old) are:

1. listen to your users
2. *actually* listen to your users
3. expect criticism
4. be honest & open
5. be open & honest
6. you can't please everyone
7. enable

I should point out that we don't think we are always great at doing all these things, certainly historically. But they are what we have learnt over 7 years, and are lessons we aim to follow, and mostly do follow now.

Most of the slides form the basis for a wider explanation and discussion, so if we ever get time and there's any demand, we might record some commentary for it too.

Both myself (Jonathan) and Simon presented today at the 2gether08 festival - which they describe as:

an extraordinarily rich schedule for July 2-3 in London, when 350 people will be exploring how digital technologies can bring us major new social benefits.

Our talk was entitled The 7 year Itch: 7 lessons to avoid digital divorce (they asked for titles in "creative marketing language", hence it's quite fluffy and we'll probably put it up online in due course, but you can follow some of the other interesting speakers live today through the miracles of internet technology below:

Plus, if you're on twitter, you can follow news from the conference at www.twitter.com/2gether08 or see what people are talking about on summize.

Unfortunately we couldn't stay there all day, but it's great to follow the live streams online and listen in to lots of really interesting people talking about lots of thought provoking stuff.

www.iPledge.org.uk

In the words of The Buwan Kothi International Trust, the iPledge site is a "blog that celebrates the efforts and hard work of our many supporters - and reminds everyone that making a donation is not the only way of supporting our activities".

I caught up with Kevin from the Trust who had some very interesting things to say about devolved fundraising, word of mouth marketing and using free web tools.

Read on or download the full story: Download ipledge.doc

What is your charity and what do you do?

In December 2005, friends and relatives of Gilly Mundy and Debbie Quargnolo travelled from the UK to the tiny rural village of Buwan Kothi in Haryana, northern India, to celebrate their wedding. We were all overwhelmed by the warmth and generosity of the welcome from the village and resolved to develop and strengthen links between people in the UK and Haryana.

In March 2006, the Buwan Kothi International Trust was formed to raise funds for projects in Haryana and our major objective was to build a primary school in Buwan Kothi, a task that was given an even greater impetus by Gilly's sudden death in March 2007, aged only 36.

Where did the idea of the iPledge site come from?

We wanted to celebrate the hard work of our many supporters and remind everyone that making a donation is not the only way of supporting our activities. Making a pledge can involve making a difference by taking part in (or organising) a sponsored event, or volunteering some free time, or talking to friends and colleagues about the Trust and what it has achieved so far.

Over the last year, we have managed to raise a considerable sum whilst keeping our costs to a minimum (less than £40 in 2007-08 out of a total of £52K). This has only been possible because of using the internet and e-mail rather than more expensive publicity but also because we have actively encouraged ‘devolved fundraising’, by letting supporters do whatever they can to help, without necessarily organising everything ourselves.

What did you want the iPledge site to achieve?

The iPledge site will hopefully help to encourage supporters to see the charity as belonging not to its trustees but to everyone that gets involved. The charity was the brainchild of a large group of friends with many skills and a variety of different talents and we want to keep that ethos at the forefront of our fundraising activities.

Using a blog enables everyone to see the range of activities that people have pledged to undertake and act as a reminder that each individual supportive action is part of a wider community seeking to help the Trust’s work. And, of course, it has cost us next to nothing to set up!

What sort of feedback have you had?

It’s early days yet but feedback has been very positive. For example, the number of supporters pledging to take part in our fundraising cycle ride in July looks set to top the 26 riders who took part last year (and raised more than £20K between them).

Some of your fundraisers have raised more than others - do you know why some are more successful?

For us, the amount raised is less important than the fact that so many people are willing to make an effort. Some supporters have wider – and wealthier – circles of friends than others, but every penny counts.

As a new and small charity, we also know our profile is nowhere near as high as the big charities, but that donations are nearly always made by families and friends supporting individual efforts, rather than on our name recognition, so the more people pledge to fundraise for us, the better. Building our profile by word of mouth helps to keep our costs to a minimum and make sure that so far, 99.9% of the money we have raise directly supports communities in Haryana.

How has Justgiving helped?

Devolved fundraising involves surrendering a certain amount of overall control, but as a charity we have an obligation to ensure that fundraising undertaken in our name is accountable and transparent. Justgiving provides us with this, because donations come straight to us rather than through each individual fundraiser.

Anyone making a donation can be completely confident that their money goes directly – and promptly – to the Trust. It also helps individual supporters to contact friends and family all over the country and encourage donations without the fuss of asking for cheques or collecting cash.

Was it easy to set up the blog on Blogger?

Setting up a blog on Blogger is very straightforward. Some knowledge of basic HTML is needed for changing from one of Blogger’s basic templates to something like the free template
we used to improve the look of the site, but the basic templates aren’t that bad.

If anyone wants to borrow our idea for their own charity and is struggling, then I’m happy to try and explain to them in more detail how we set up our blog.

Did it take up much time or resource?

Initial set up wasn’t too time-consuming because we had the necessary IT skills amongst our supporters. Maintaining the site is a doddle – it takes a matter of minutes to add new pledges via the Blogger ‘dashboard’ and because the site is accessed via a web browser, requires no special software or programming knowledge. Mainly, it has involved adding a title to a post, some standard wording and pasting in an individual’s Justgiving widget.

**********

Thanks for taking the time to speak to us Kevin, you’ve shared a lot of useful information that other charities can use. The concept of ‘devolved fundraising’ is something we are seeing more and more on Justgiving – as I mentioned recently on the blog with the rise of occasion fundraising.

It’s also a great example of using free tools like Blogger to start some word-of-mouth marketing and generate a *buzz* around a small charity.

Why are you changing this?

Every time a report was generated, data was retrieved from our database in real time, so when lots of reports were run at the same time our servers were processing huge amounts of data and our site performance was suffering.

As our CTO Dom said in April, we’re in the process of separating our reporting database from the live database so there will be one that deals solely with reporting. So, in future, reports won’t affect general site performance, but it’s a big project and will take some time.

Will we still see how much we’re being paid?

Yes, when we make the payment on a Friday, you’ll still see the summary of what you’re being paid. Depending on your charity’s bank, the money will arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the payment report data will be available on the Wednesday.

What about old payments?

You’ll still be able to see and download reports on all payments made before the end of July at any time. These reports will be generated in real time, unlike the new payment reports which will be pre-generated and ready to download.

We're used to thanking people based on payment reports..

We're aware that this change may affect some processes you have in place, so we'd like to help find out what other reports we could provide to help you more. Just click on the poll below:

Is this the last change to reporting now?

We still need to make small changes to the Gift Aid analysis and Gift Aid payment reports over the next month to take into account the changes to Gift Aid and the payment of transitional relief. You can read more about those changes in this riveting blog post (which is strangely the most popular post we’ve ever done…).