Jonathan Waddingham

Tag: justgiving

  • The JustGiving numbers behind #nomakeupselfie

    Now that we’ve had the selfies, and the blogs against selfies, and the blogs for selfies, and the blogs about what charities can learn from selfies, there’s really not much left to say about the #nomakeupselfie campaign. So I won’t bother (or perhaps leave it to my sessions at Fundraising Online or the IoF National Convention) and direct you to Madeleine’s blog for a fab collection of selfie-themed articles and blog posts to get up to speed.

    Instead, I’ll just share some numbers from JustGiving that reinforce just how powerful it was, and what a viral campaign does to your analytics. Over a million was donated on JustGiving to selfie related campaigns, which is impressive enough, but how that happened is just as interesting…

    • We saw an increase of 15,743% in the number of mobile direct donation shares compared to previous period*
    • An increase of 7,406% in the number of desktop direct donation shares
    • 30% of mobile direct donors shared their donation afterwards and 26% of desktop direct donors shared their donation (again, mobile users share more)
    • An increase of 47,331% in the amount donated from shares after a direct donation on mobile
    • An increase of 430,702% in the amount donated from shares after a direct donation on desktop
    • An increase in visits of 50%, with a a peak of 9,000 concurrent users on the site at the busiest period (22.00 on Wednesday – is your Ops team on call 24/7?)
    • Overall, 2% of desktop donations and 7% of mobile donations were made from post donation sharing to social networks – donations which would not have been made were it not for the social sharing tools tightly integrated to our donation process. This doesn’t count visits as a result of fundraising page or charity profile shares before donating, so the numbers would be even higher in reality. Sonny’s law in action…
    • 51% of visits on peak day were from mobile, 36% from desktop and 13% tablet. I’d guess that’s the most mobile heavy day we’ve ever had, although January 2014 was the first month where we had more traffic from mobile alone than desktop, so it’s part of a wider trend.
    • Just under 500,000 visits from Facebook from over 11 million impressions on Facebook on Wednesday 19th alone.

    And pretty much every graph looks like the one below:

    Facebook distribution graph

     

    So yes, if you hadn’t realised it already, #nomakeupselfie was big. Big.

    What else can we learn?

    Build for mobile, build for shares, build to scale.

    Watch the video over on the JG blog for more.

    *All dates are from Tuesday 18th to Sunday 23rd March (the appeal spiked on Wednesday 19th) compared to previous period of Tuesday 11th – Sunday 16th March.

  • Open graph now open for service on JG

    Back in October, I wrote about one of Facebook’s latest BETA features and how I was quite excited about its potential (see Grammar as a platform and sentences as a service – Facebook’s new open graph). After the open graph (or Timeline apps, as they’re known) went live in January earlier this year, there have been quite a few success stories of apps/products getting massive exposure and hockey stick shaped usage graphs as a result. Notable winners have been the Guardian and social media flavour of the month Pinterest.

    Having seen their success and thought long and hard about how we could integrate, it was very exciting to hear from Facebook themselves a couple of weeks ago asking how our integration was going – as they were looking for some new apps to promote for a big European launch. Luckily, we were in the middle of working on the integration, so it was perfect timing.  I say it was perfect timing, although it would have been better to not be releasing the new feature on the day of the demo – especially as one of the features we released was just an idea on Friday and live by the following Thursday. That’s by a long way the quickest turnaround of any product from inception to release I’ve ever been involved in. Even the tech guys at Facebook were impressed at our speed, *beams*.

    Anyway, it was very exciting to be invited to Amsterdam last week to demo our new app. Cue excited tweet…

    Essentially the new integration allows you to share messages on Facebook about “donating to a fundraising page” and “thanking a donor” in the newsfeed, ticker and on timeline. And it’s the aggregations I’m most excited about, showing on a timeline the friends people have sponsored, charities they’ve given to as well as how much they gave (if that’s public). See this blog post for more, but you get a flavour from the screenshot below. It’s interesting and tells you things you might not know or remember, that’s the key.

    So anyway, as a result of this, we got a bunch of great coverage in places from The Next Web to the Telegraph, not to mention in Facebook’s Christian Hernandez’s keynote at the The Next Web conference (see video here). But my particular favourite headline was in T3: “JustGiving launches Facebook timeline widget to aid humanity“. Can’t say more than that.

    I’m really excited to see how this works out for us, and will no doubt be banging on about the stats when it does (look forward to that), but it’s nice to get some coverage about our tech work for once. We’ve got a stellar development team and I think (naturally) that we do a lot of innovative work, but that is not always acknowledged in the sector.

    Now I just need to get back to working on the next product to aid humanity…(!)