Virgin Money launches low cost rival to Justgiving

Virgin Money has launched the long awaited online fundraising service, Virgin Money Giving.

Virgin Group says the not-for-profit service will raise an additional £5m for every £100m put through its system.

The site will only look to cover its costs and will not charge for administering Gift Aid to donations. Any profit Virgin Money Giving makes will be invested back into improving the service it offers and further cost reductions.

As with other online fundraising and sponsorship systems such as Justgiving and BeMyCharity Charities can create their own promotional pages on the site and send out email alerts to fundraisers to promote events and fundraising, view reports and access fundraiser data.

Virgin Money are the new sponsor of the annual London marathon from 2010, having signed a £17m deal for a five-year contract to replace Flora, which sponsored the event for 14 years.

Virgin founder, Sir Richard Branson said: “Virgin Money Giving is a great example of business working in partnership with the third sector to create new ways of doing things where everyone is better off.”

The Virgin site is not yet open to fundraisers but the public launch will be announced shortly.

Rival online fundraising service Justgiving.com currently has over 8m users worldwide.

Justgiving’s Managing Director, Anne-Marie Huby, talked to Third Sector earlier this week, explaining the differences between the two models:

“By its very name, Virgin Money Giving is a promotional vehicle for the Virgin Money brand. For us, charity giving is not a marketing opportunity, it is our sole purpose. As a social enterprise, we continue to re-invest all our profits into our platform for the benefit of charities.

Charities will continue to look for value and expertise when selecting their strategic online partner: they will choose the team who can help them raise more, and Justgiving will continue to lead the way. Our new platform launching in the summer will transform online fundraising once again.”

How the generations use facebook

A study from Anderson Analytics shows how the generations are using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Generation Z (13 to 14 years old) use MySpace (65%) and Facebook (61%) more than any other site in the study. Only 9% of this group use Twitter, and none use LinkedIn.

75% of Generation Y (15 to 29 years old) use MySpace with 65% on Facebook.

The Generation X group (30 to 44 years old) and baby boomers (44 to 65 years old), are likely to use Facebook, followed by Twitter, and are the biggest users of LinkedIn.

90% older social network users, which Anderson Analytics name the WWII generation, used Facebook, and 17% tweeted. The Baby Boomers and WWII groups are least likely to use MySpace.

When users were asked why they joined a social network, however, the reasons were similar across the generations: everybody wanted to keep in touch with friends and family. Younger groups were most likely to be interested in fun and friends, while family contact appealed more to older social networkers.

Despite our best efforts to sell our causes on the various social networks, very few users of any age joined for business-related purposes such as recruiting potential candidates, sales, job searches or business networking.

So the challenge continues to be getting the attention of people who are on site to network with family and friends, and then convert interested social networking followers into committed supporters.

TwitCause.. $$ for causes or spam fatigue?

In the US Facebook and Myspace Causes have been one of the most popular apps. It has raised some $10,000,000 in two years.

TwitCause, from Experience Project, intends to bring the same social/viral/giving idea to twitter.

Each Thursday, TwitCause announce a new cause for the week. Tweeters follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show support for it. Supporters can donate via a short link to paypal and the money raised and the number of retweets is shown on the TwitCause homepage.

The V Foundation is the first TwitCause and the service was launched on the 6th of August. The V Foundation is a cancer research organization named after the US basketball coach Jim Valvano. Because of the baseball/ celeb factor, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. They hope to get high profile athletes such as Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting.

Followers of Tweetcause can nominate and vote for NFP’s to become the next weekly “cause”.

TwitCause is also hoping that businesses and brands will want to get involved to sponsor causes as well, matching tweets with dollar amounts in support.

It will be extremely interesting to watch the impact of this new idea for direct online fundraising. The influence of the tweeter will be seen not only in the donations and matched funding but in the selection of the weekly cause. In addition the platform offers corporate an opportunity to gain advertising space through the twitter network by sponsoring a weekly cause.

Rather than using social networking for relationship building and then pushing supporters onto websites or offline events (like twestival) TwitCause will seek to use the viral/social/tell-your-friends aspect of twitter to raise money.

But with the limited number of active tweeters, and the same people retweeting a new cause every week, you have to wonder how fast TweetCause spam fatigue will set in.

Find out more at http://www.experienceproject.com/twitcause (shame they couldn't afford a URL)

So what do Teens do?

In their recent report How Teens Use Media, Nielsen “debunks” the myths that teenagers are addicted to new media and unreachable by conventional means. In fact the report shows that on average teenagers behave in similar ways to their parents.

Their surveys show that while US teens watch less TV than the average (104:24 (hh:mm) against 153:27), it is still nearly 10x the amount of time spent on the internet (11:32). Twelve million US teens watched video online in May (2/3 of the internet population) and 18% watched video content on their mobiles.

Even more surprisingly while 90% of US teens have access to the internet at home and 73% at school (a surprising statistic in itself) they only spend an average of Eleven Hours, 32 minutes online, Way below the average 29 hours per month. Nearly half of US online teens visited social networking sites, and they are more likely to update their profiles than adults, but otherwise their internet use mirrors the general online population.

One myth Neilson confirms is the high use of mobile phones and texting.77% of US teens have a mobile and another 11% regularly borrow one. 83% of these use texting and 56% use MMS/picture messaging. On average US teens send or receive a staggering 2899 texts per month, an increase of 56% over the past 2 years.

However Neilson point out that the myth that teenagers ONLY text is also wrong – they are early adopters of all mobile technologies:

“More than one-third of teens download ringtones, instant message or use the mobile Web, while about one-quarter of U.S. teens download games and applications. To a lesser extent, teens are using video messaging (26%), watching mobile video (18%) and using location-based services on their phone (16%).”


Again the myth that teenagers are dominant in the gaming arena is debunked by figures that show they make up only 23% of the “console” audience and 10% of PC gaming minutes. Having said that 83% of US teens have at least one console in their rooms.

So in conclusion, teens are early adopters and use the whole range of mobile and internet tools, but TV still takes up more of their time that any other medium. So while we need to be speaking to them in “their space” they are still seeing, and presumably absorbing, they same messages as the wider population through the same mediums.

Let’s not get too excited...

According to stolen documents published by TechCrunch, Twitter's internal growth forecast estimates users growing from the current 12 million to 25 million by the end of 2009, 100 million by the end of 2010 and 350 million by the end of 2011 (making it far bigger than Facebook, which is currently the biggest with 250 million users).

Without a doubt Twitter's unique users count is rising extremely fast, estimated to have multiplied by 8 in a year, but most commenttors think the jury is out on it reaching these numbers, especially when we consider that 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. Interestingly all these social media marketeers are also likely to post far above the average number of tweets per day - and are all following each other.

The number of people actively using twitter is surprisingly small according to An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World by Sysomos Inc. (http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/)

• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet,
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day,
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people,
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity.

So less than 15% post daily, less than 7% have more than 100 followers and less than half are “active” where active is posting more than once a week.

This chart by David McCandless takes these figures and shows us the percentages in a great graphic - although I would suggest the 5 with more than 100 followers are also the 5 loud mouths:



(http://www.flickr.com/photos/25541021%40N00/3706760751/in/set-72157620803945238/ )