Macmillan Cancer Support is delighted to have been JustGiving's number one fundraising charity from the 2010 London Marathon. Thanks to the many innovative and effective fundraising tools that Justgiving has created, both on the web and on mobile, our supporters have raised significantly more than ever before.
Sue Blunt,
Macmillan Cancer Support,
London Marathon Coordinator
JustGiving was started in early 2000 by Zarine Kharas and Anne-Marie Huby, with a simple vision. They wanted to use the power of the internet to enable people to raise far more for charities, easily and cost-effectively.
They created the UK's first online fundraising business. Over the past 11 years, JustGiving has changed the face of charitable giving in the UK:
Every penny of every pound that a person donates through JustGiving goes straight to their chosen charity (if it's eligible for Gift Aid). For this service, JustGiving charges a 5% fee that comes out of the Gift Aid that we reclaim for charities, and a £15-a-month membership fee.
On average, charities in the UK spend between 15p and 25p to raise every new £1 by traditional means such as direct mail and street fundraising. Reclaiming Gift Aid is also costly, and many charities do not even try. The Charities Aid Foundation estimates that over £700m in Gift Aid continues to lie unclaimed every year. JustGiving reduces costs on both fronts, which is why charities find it such good value for money.
Since our launch, we have invested over £14m in technology alone. We are 72-strong, including 35 engineers and web specialists, and 15 customer service and charity support people. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually quite a small team to look after our 13 million users, thousands of charities and 37 servers (the powerful big computers that run the website). Read more
Our site went live in February 2001, and we have not stood still since. We were the first to come up with a Facebook application back in 2007, which has now been used by over a million people. Our mobile apps help fundraisers track their progress on the go, and now their donors will be able to give that way, too.
In March of 2011, co-founder Zarine Kharas spoke to Chris Blackhurst of the Evening Standard about how, and why, our model works for our charity members - and how it enables us to serve charities better than if we were a charity ourselves. You can read her interview here.
We are a tailor-made service with a single purpose: raising money for charity. On JustGiving you'll find no spam, no ads, and no distractions. That is why our charities raise much more through JustGiving than any other service.
Some think we shouldn't make money out of charitable giving. We believe strongly that not only there is no contradiction, but that JustGiving is far better at helping charities precisely because it is a business than if it were a charity ourselves. More importantly, our charity members think so too.
Charities spend large amounts of money every year on commercial services, from direct marketing to IT services and utilities. What matters to them is - are they getting value for money?
The cost and effort involved in running a state-of-the-art online giving operation explains why quite a few big charities, which started looking at setting up their own, decided not to. Charities and foundations can't invest in high-risk, groundbreaking ventures. We can.
Eleven years on, our aim is as focused and simple as when we began: to keep innovating to help people and charities raise more money than they ever thought possible for the causes they care about.JustTextGiving is a new service that allows any charity in the UK, big or small, to receive donations via text message. Thanks to our partners Vodafone, it’s completely free to set up and run, and 100% of the donation, plus Gift Aid, goes to charity. Find out more