Name: Product Update Briefing - JustGiving™ from Blackbaud
Uploaded: 2025-05-08T17:31:33.743Z
Duration: 35 min 24 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - JustGiving™ from Blackbaud

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - JustGiving™ from Blackbaud": Hi, everyone, and a warm welcome to our JustGiving product update briefing for organizations in North America. We're very much looking forward to sharing recent and upcoming feature updates with you today. The webinar audio today is going to be broadcasted from your computer speakers, so hopefully you can hear me. If you need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen. Personally, I like to use captions anytime I'm in a webinar just because we all come from different parts of the world in the country, and so I like to use those captions to help me understand what's being said a little bit better. If you encounter any audio or technical issues, maybe the slides might freeze, you'll need to go ahead and refresh your browser. That's the best way to get it working again. Worst case scenario, go ahead and leave log in again. And then while you're here, let me go over a few other things. Over to the top right hand side, you should have a q and a button. Please submit any questions you have there. There is a team backstage working to diligently answer your questions. When you submit your questions, the more specific, the more details you have, the better. That way we can address your questions directly. Next to q and a you're going to see docs. You can click on this for several links and resources that you may want to access during our presentation and save for future reference. You can adjust any settings by using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space and finally you can also see the tabs on the top of the event space to see today's agenda and meet your various speakers. Speaking of agenda, this is our agenda today. We are going to start with some introductions followed by a quick overview of JustGiving, including a couple of examples that are currently on the JustGiving platform, and then we'll move on to focus to the focus of today's talk centered around the various product road map updates, and finally, we'll close out with some next steps and resources for you. You'll see a pop up poll on the screen now. If you'd like our sales team to contact you about any of the updates that you hear today, please let us know. We'll keep that live for a few more minutes. Okay. These are your speakers and presenters for today. Hi, everyone. I am Jackie. I am joined by Thomas Forgione, product manager here at JustGiving and Blackbaud, and Mat Lloyd, product manager also here at Blackbaud and JustGiving. Nice to have all of you here. Looking forward to our presentation today. A reminder that while our talk today does focus on JustGiving and Blackbaud's current plans and our general direction, we will describe functionality that at times is not currently available and is subject to change at any time at our sole discretion. So let's get started. At its core, JustGiving is a global peer to peer fundraising platform. That means that we help nonprofits to connect with supporters worldwide, making it simple for your organization to create and manage campaigns to which your supporters can give directly or create and share their own fundraising pages and encourage their personal networks to give. In 2025, we are celebrating our twenty fifth year since being founded, and I'd like to celebrate with you all because you all have a lot to do with this number here. JustGiving has raised over $10,000,000,000 for good causes around the world. So applause to all of you and all of the work that you've done to raise funds for organizations and missions and causes that matter. JustGiving is ultimately a bridge that brings together the passion of fundraisers, the needs of good causes, and the generosity of donors. We achieve this through empowering fundraisers to simply raise funds for the causes closest to their hearts, making it easy for them to make a difference. We then enable good causes to optimize their donations, allowing them to fully fund their essential. As you all know, every contribution counts. Lastly, we provide donors with the convenience they deserve. We make it simple for them to give support to their friends and family and causes they believe in. JustGiving can be used for direct giving, fundraising, large campaigns, and events for your nonprofit. It's free for any US and Canadian charity to use. It also automates into it also automatically integrates with Blackbaud products including Razer's Edge NXT, eTapestry, and Blackbaud CRM. The native integration allows data to flow directly from DERSC giving to your chosen CRM, saving you time and allowing you to view real time data directly in your database. Okay. While we're still celebrating, I'd like a chance to celebrate some of you all. Last fall, the JustGiving team entered a partnership with Run Ottawa. Run Ottawa provides Canada's premier running events and organize Canada's most popular multi multi day running event, the Tamarack Race Weekend. As part of the partnership, I'd like to feature two of over 70 charities, you heard that right, 70 charities participating in the event. While all the charities represent worthy causes, for me these two are standout for the use of the JustGiving campaign. First, you're looking at the Ottawa Hospital. I really like the use of the cover photo as it makes it clear that this campaign is for the Run Ottawa events. There's obviously a natural synergy between a healthcare provider and a multi day event and it shows because the Ottawa Hospital has over a 48 participants in the event and fundraising. Ottawa Hospital also uses teams and team captains to increase participation in the event and leverage more fundraising. When I've completed this particular portion of the talk, I'll give you guys a couple of links to look at if you'd like to check out their live pages. Another organization with strong energy in the use of the JustGiving campaign in the run Ottawa events, the Ottawa Heart Institute. The consistent use of look, feel, and branding on the page bring a sense of motivation and camaraderie. I really like those pops of red in the goal, meter, and use of what I'm going to call the pretzel heart logo. It creates a strong sense of brand, community, and belonging. Overall, great work to the 70 charities in Run Ottawa. The JustGiving team is definitely rooting for you, and we can't wait to see what you do later on in this month. I think it's important to also feature fundraisers. I'm going to feature here Janet, one fundraiser from the Ottawa Hospital. The fundraising page is almost halfway to their goal, and Janet is very clearly passionate about fundraising for the Ottawa Hospital. I like the image. It looks like they're having a lot of fun and ready to support their area hospital. Switching gears to a US based organization, I would like to take a moment to feature the WINGS program and their giving day. Again, consistent look, feel, branding, bring a sense of belonging, identification with the organization and community. Wings is using a Giving Day style fundraising approach for their fundraising. This was Wings' first Giving Day on the JustGiving platform. And while their goal wasn't reached, we applaud the $32,000 raised and the overall reach within the community. And then finally, an organization that I am highlighting, the YMCA. Maybe this is because I go to the YMCA basically every single day of my life, but I love the YMCA and the work that they're doing on the platform. Since 2022, YMCA affiliates across The United States have raised a collective total of over $2,600,000. A standout YMCA for this year includes Valley of the Sun YMCA and they currently have one campaign page on JustGiving per branch and they have already passed half a million dollars in 2025 alone. One more YMCA, and I will admit this is my Texan bias here. Way to go to the YMCA of Greater San Antonio in Hill Country. This page launched in late February and is already seeing a total of over $138,000 For the citywide YMCA, and this is a campaign per branch again, I really enjoy these YMCA pages. So good job YMCA. I think you've got a natural synergy by asking your members to become fundraisers. Well, that was fun. I love getting a chance to celebrate you all, your achievements. Congratulations to all of our fundraisers and charities on the platform in 2025. Next, let's talk about roadmap highlights and I'm going to give you some updates since our last product update briefing which took place in the fall of twenty twenty four. Let's start by talking about how we're going to help you be more impactful this year. Please keep in mind that road map plans are always subject to change. We have releases that are planned across the charity, fundraiser, and donor experience. We'll be touching on most of these across our product update session. Next, we're going to be highlighting four road map updates. These are the releases I'm most excited about as I think they're going to drive huge impact for you. Thomas, you are up next. Excellent. Thanks, Jackie. So I wanna to kick us off, I wanna spotlight our exciting cryptocurrency implementation, which enables donors to support nonprofits using our new crypto payment method. So following a successful UK launch last November, we've now extended this capability to all of our US staff and BBMS charities. And before I recap on the functionality at JustGiving, I'd like to get a sense of your cryptocurrency knowledge with just two quick live polls. So, hopefully, this works. So do bear with me while I share the first one. So on your screen, you should see the poll, and I'll open it up. But approximately, how many crypto holders are there in North America? 5 Hundred Thousand, few votes there. Two votes for 2,000,000 or lots of votes there for 60,000,000, and 300 million's got a few. Oh, you've gone for 2,000,000. I'll leave it there for one more second, maybe two. Cool. I'll close it there. So you've gone for sixty five sixty five votes for 2,000,000. The correct answer is actually 60,000,000. So it's a huge, huge opportunity out there to engage with crypto users as potential donors. Now the second question I have for you is should be up on the screen now. But how much was donated to North American nonprofits in crypto in 2024? So please feel free to vote. 80,000,000, 3 hundred and 60 million, 7 hundred million dollars, or $1,000,000,000. Leave it live for a few seconds. Lot of you going for 80,000,000. 3 hundred and 60. Only a few of you there for 1,000,000,000. I'll leave it live for one more second, and let's close it. So you've gone the majority has gone for 80,000,000. The correct answer is actually a whopping $1,000,000,000 just demonstrating the generosity amongst the crypto community. So it's a huge, huge space. So let me stop sharing that and get back to the slides. Do bear with me. Two seconds. Excellent. So it looks like some of you know your stuff, which is great, but let's talk about how, how many cryptocurrency donations have been sent to nonprofit causes on our JustGiving platform, and this is globally since our launch. So as expected, usage did start quite small, but we're now growing steadily. And we've had around $300,000 in donations globally with the largest single amount being around $74,000, and the largest overall total for a single nonprofit being a whopping a hundred and $9,000. That's a huge amount. The average donation value of a crypto donation is $389. And if we remove the outliers, so the largest and the smallest 5% to give us a truer number, we get the average of $83 per transaction, which is still double the platform average to what we see standard payment methods do like card or wallet transactions. So as you see, the early signs are pretty amazing, and it really shows that this is a route to larger gifts from a different donor base, for instance, a younger demographic compared to the typical supporter we see on our platform. So philanthropy in crypto is huge and growing. And here is what it looks like for our donors. So the donor begins by choosing a fundraiser or nonprofit cause on JustGiving, and they then then land on the checkout amount page, which you see on the far left. It's here the user can choose their cryptocurrency, and the donor can pick from around 70 supported cryptocurrencies. After pressing continue, the user then lands on the donation summary to review the donation. And then to complete the donation, we use an integration with our partner, the Giving Block, who are the world leaders in crypto philanthropy, and they handle tens of millions of dollars worth of transactions. It's here it's here where our donor, who already has cryptocurrency, remember, can interact with their cryptocurrency wallet, and then they can simply complete their donation. And then finally, the donors return to the JustGiving thank you page, and then they receive the usual thank you email. And as usual, the the the charity also receives the donor data and the funds in exact in the exact same way as any other donation, so nothing changes for your nonprofits at all. And the donor who has chose cryptocurrency has just donated through this very streamlined journey. And then I'll my last crypto slide my last crypto slide, I wanted to address some common concerns if you do still have any. So here are three solutions for these common concerns. Firstly, neither JustGiving or your charity ever hold the cryptocurrency. So the giving block, our partner, receive the cryptocurrency from the donor. They sell it for traditional money as fast as they can, and then they send those funds to us at JustGiving for us to disperse as usual. That protects us all from sudden changes in crypto value, and it makes it much easier to fit within your nonprofit policy as neither us or your nonprofit hold that crypto. Secondly, the JustGiving are very proactive and robust in their anti fraud measures. They have blockchain analysis, transaction monitoring, and and they have the need to stay compliant with financial regulations as so do we, like the FCA. So we can assure you that we monitor each and every transaction for fraud or anti money laundering. And lastly, regarding environmental impact, many popular cryptocurrencies are now adopting less energy intensive technologies like proof of stake, And these are these are often preferred for crypto philanthropy and for giving, for instance, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, and the JustGiving support around 70 different coins. And, of course, if you do have any further questions, please do find them in the chat, and I can reply after my sections. So moving on from crypto, we also have the message enhancer, which started as an AB test last year to reduce checkout friction and boost conversion. This is an AI tool that helps donors create impactful messages or enhance messages instantly on the message page, which is found in our checkout. We developed this after observing quite a lengthy forty to sixty second completion time on this page and an increased drop off from donors, possibly as they, have decision fatigue or simply a loss of inspiration when messaging a family or friend. So we tested this, product, this new feature. And since its successful test, we've launched it, and over 200,000 donors have used this AI tool to generate a message, staying engaged and then proceeding through the checkout. And most importantly, this feature has reduced checkout abandonment and drop offs by a whopping 4.7%, strengthening that fundraiser and donor connection. It just shows you how a small test or an AI driven change like this can really deepen engagement within the checkout and then increase that donor lifetime value that we know is so important. Jackie, I'm gonna pass over to you in a second as you've actually got firsthand example of of using this recently. And if you don't mind, could you pass over to Mat when when you're finished? Thanks, Jackie. Yeah. Happy to share this story with you all as I happen to really like the message enhancer. Sometimes I find myself in a hurry, and I don't write the most eloquent thing. So as an example, because we're so excited about the work that the charities and the fundraisers are doing for Run Ottawa, we decided to give a donation to one fundraiser on the platform. At first, I put in a message that was like, way to go. The JustGiving team is happy to support you. Not terrible, but it can definitely be enhanced. So I used Message Enhancer, which changed my message to Marcus Korbel. It wrote Message Enhancer wrote, your dedication is inspiring. Keep pushing towards your goal for Ottawa Salas Corporation. To celebrate your achievements, you were selected as the winner of a surprise donation. I'm going to put the link to that particular donation and that message there in the chat so you can see it live in action. Now on to you, Mat. Thank you, Jackie, and hello everyone. Shortly, I'll be running through a deep dive of the new and upcoming changes we have for the charity and fundraising experience. But first, let's continue with some more road map highlights. The charity profile page is often the first view that potential fundraisers have of the charity. It's an opportunity to showcase the amazing work that charities are doing and shine a light on top of fundraisers and donors. Now we know that the profile page has needed some love over the past couple of years, and I'm really excited to say that we'll be releasing the first iteration of the new profile page in upcoming months. Ahead of this release, we've worked really closely with charities, fundraisers, and donors, over 300 in total, to understand the goals, motivations, behaviors, and challenges with the current profile page. This ins this insight allowed us to focus on improving customization options for charities, overhaul the content hierarchy of the page to ensure that the prospective fundraisers and donors are viewing engaging content and creating consistency between our other pages such as campaigns, fundraising, and fundraising pages to provide familiarity with our users. The initial release itself is just the start, and our approach is iterative where we'll be looking to make incremental improvements after our first release where we'll look to increase traffic and improve donations to both fundraisers, and donate. Now briefly turning our attention to the fundraiser experience for our final road map highlights. Over the past couple of years, our focus has been heavily has heavily been on improving both both the page creation and page view experience for our fundraisers, where we've some seen some really amazing results in terms of pages created and overall fundraising page value. Now our attention is switching slightly to see how we can assist fundraisers in maximizing their fundraising efforts through its life cycle. Through extensive research, we understood that fundraisers generally felt unsure what to do next and how to get the best out of their fundraising, whilst equally, donors highlight the lack of engaging content as a factor for not donating. Now coming in late twenty twenty five, we'll be looking to provide a unified post page creation experience for all of our consumers, whether they're fundraising, crowdfunding, or managing a team. As a result of our research, we'll be exploring features with the within the fundraising admin such as an enriched onboarding experience, providing clear onboard actions to boost page activation and page value. We'll be looking at in page prompts, looking at tips, help, and support to get the most out of their pages. And lastly, automation elements, assisting assistance for fundraisers and posting updates and sharing their progress. As you can tell, we're really excited about how how we'll be able to deliver this for fundraisers through their life cycle. We'll be sure to keep you updated of the progress in upcoming clubs. Now I just want to take you through some of some further charity and fundraiser updates that we have, which are just exciting. So let's first start on the charity experience where I'd like to focus on two specific areas, the campaign page admin and our claims page service. Now as you know, campaigns remain one of the most important tools for our charity to raise funds on JustGiving. 2024 was an incredible year with 17,000 campaigns launched. One of the core features we look to deliver as part of this successful year was to reduce friction for our charity users when managing multiple campaigns. Through our new search functionality, we've made it much easier for charity users to be able to find the relevant campaign, giving yourselves more time to focus on making tweaks or scheduling changes. The feature itself is slick, simple to use, and allows the users the ability to see see results as you type, filter results by the states of the campaign, particularly helpful when you have a lot of post historical campaigns, sort the results by campaign creation, and reset settings back to the default in OneSearch. And as you can imagine, we've seen some really positive numbers here from an engagement perspective. Since we released last year, we've seen that over 90% of users leveraging the search feature, which is really great to see. Now moving on, I'd like now I'd like to talk to you about all things claim pages. So you might be thinking, what do you mean by claim page? Well, this is when a page is created for a supporter, usually as part of their registration ready ready for them to claim and use. It has currently been used by several of our integration partners, such as GivePanel and Let's Do This, as well as bespoke services that we have at JustGiving. When the page is created, there is a bespoke link for the supporter to claim their page, which enables them to claim, which effectively means taking ownership of the page through linking the page to their JustGiving account, allowing them to subsequently personalize their page. Or if they choose not to claim, the page can still be leveraged to collect donations without any personalization beyond the charity defaults. With demand for this service and end to end, we've undertook a research project to understand how charities, integration partners, and fundraisers are using the services and what developments we could use to optimize the experience. Over the coming months, we'll be releasing our new claims page service, which has leveraged insight to focus on areas such as greater control for charities and integration partners to create fundraising pages that are preloaded with fundraising data. So think target, custom codes, etcetera. Fundraisers creating pages through plain page service will now receive a charity branded experience, so logo and branded colors, and the landing page which explains the benefits of claiming your page. This will streamline the experience when moving from a third party registration site to the JustGiving flow. They will also benefit from upfront customization as I mentioned earlier, but this time for a model versus being right redirected to their page and having to navigate their admin to make customizations. Lastly, fundraisers will also have the ability to leverage story enhancer. Our story writing assistant has been a huge success in our global page creation since its release in October 2023. Through these changes, we expect to see both an increase in page activation, so pages receiving their first donation, and overall fundraising page value. Now let's switch our attention back to fundraisers and give you a sneak peek, as to what else we've got released and soon to be released. So all fundraising team and campaign pages on JustGiving have sharing options. These make it easy for fundraisers to tap into their networks and raise more. Every single time somebody hits the share button on JustGiving, that means an average of $81 in donations for yourselves. By making it easier to share a fundraising page, we've seen a 13% increase in pages share year on year. This has meant an 11% increase in traffic and donations to fundraising pages from social channels. One in one in every four donations on JustGiving comes from sharing activity. I appreciate that I've given you a lot of stats there, but what does that mean? Well, that means that share that with your fundraisers and keep reminding them that the sharing is really key to hitting their targets. Whilst the numbers I've mentioned have been really positive, we don't want to stop there. And that's why this year, we have some really exciting initiatives which we will hope further supercharge fundraiser sharing opportunities with one I'd particularly like to mention today. Very soon, we'll be making it easier and more accessible for users to share their fundraising efforts with their network. Fundraisers will be able be able to download a pass to the Apple Wallet, which will provide a snapshot of their fundraising page along with a QR code linking to their fundraising page. We hope this provides fundraisers with yet another avenue to showcase the amazing causes that they are raise raising for. Once released, we'll keep a close eye on adoption and engagement, which will determine whether we deploy this to Android. It's worth noting that I am actually an Android user, so very keen for this functionality to be released, across that too. Now taking a step back, let's take a look at a more recent sharing initiative, which has been introduced to fundraising pages. In q four last year, we released the brand new offline sharing option. First applied to fundraising pages. Choosing print creates a printable poster with a hero image, description, target amount, and a QR code linking to the fundraising page. Formatting of the poster is leveraging the defaults set by the charity within the campaign page and editable by the fundraiser on their fundraising page. Since its launch in December, we've seen some really, really positive stats with our strongest month coming in March where we saw the print option shared set over 7,000 times, which resulted in over 18,000 additional donations, helping nonprofits capture donations from a typically offline audience, which is really great to see. Now continuing the theme of offline fundraising, we're focusing on donations. I'd like to speak about itemized offline donations. So another feature that we are really, we have recently, released is itemized offline donations for fundraising pages. This is actually addressing the number one feature requested by our charities. This change ensures that we are displaying all individual donations in one place that's visible in our supporter list. Illustrated by the designs that you can see, fundraisers can continue to add their itemized offline donations in the same place where we will look to display those within the supporter list. In addition, any historical offline donation is now also visible. Whilst the feature is currently available for fundraising pages, we are exploring opportunities to apply this to our campaign offering, so watch this space. Staying with our supporter list, another exciting change released at the beginning of the year was our top donations feature, enabling supporters to see the top donation amount across fundraising, teams, and campaigns, aiding better engagement with a view to increasing the average donation value. And that's all from my side. I'll be handing back over to Thomas. He'll be running through the other great updates from a donor perspective. Excellent. Thanks, Mat. And good to know you're an Android user. I don't think I've met one of those before. Only joking. Now let's discuss the donation experience section and the innovative solutions that we at JustGiving are providing to help you raise more for your donors. So first up in our donation experience section is receipting, specifically PDF receipting. As now, we've changed the way we send receipts to securely send them as PDFs via a link in the confirmation email, replacing our email attachments. This change not only helps our donors file and store their receipts for tax purposes, but it ensures we meet all legal receipting requirements. We started this implementation by prioritizing our Canadian market, and then we followed with all markets like The US, Australia, and Europe, improving improving both on compliance and the donor experience. What one last thing to say on this is that, importantly, it also lays the groundwork for our plans to translate receipt and and more into other languages, which me which leads me nicely onto my next slide, bilingual receipting for Canada, which I think we did have a question from Steven on in the chat. So, we offer this in Canada now. This means we now support English and French or, excuse my accent there, receipts for all donations to Canadian pages. This supports our French speaking Canadian donors for tax, usability, and overall a better end to end experience, and it really demonstrates our commitment to diverse markets beyond the just The UK and US. We've also worked and continue to work closely with our Canadian legal experts to ensure compliance. And so far, we refined the receipting format to include only essential information and improve formatting. Following this, our next steps will be to discover the work for translating our end to end checkout for our French Canadian users. So this is in discovery at the moment. So do stay tuned and for our for our updates in our next product update briefing. Next up, I wanted to look at some metrics and optimization. So at JustGiving, we're always focused on maximizing every donation, and we run hundreds of tests annually to improve conversion, donation value, and payment acceptance. Around a 50 tests we ran last year alone, so quite a lot. And we wanna highlight two of the many initiatives we are testing to to boost average donation value specifically in The US market. Our initial test, which we ran last Giving Tuesday, which is the top image, explored increasing our average donation value, and it actually showed us that sharing donor averages can really positively influence giving by increasing average donation value. Building on that, we launched a new average donation test for all US donors at the bottom image. Here, we prompt users to add the average amount, which for US charities is around a hundred and $50, with our thinking being that this request will nudge donors to increase their contribution, leading to a significant uplift in overall funds raised for great causes. So this is something that we're testing right now. And then beyond donation value, conversion is also a critical metric that we actively track and optimize. Simply put, conversion measures the percentage of users who reach our checkout and then successfully donate. Higher conversion means more donors and more support for your vital causes. We're currently on the fourth iteration of our site wide checkout update, which we call the accordion style checkout. This is to this is designed to create a real frictionless and simple donation experience. As you can see in the screenshot, as you progress through the accordion style checkout, it opens and it closes smoothly as you progress, and it really speeds up that entire checkout process. As our current checkout is a phase checkout where where each section loads on a different screen, so it can be quite cumbersome. And we're currently running this test on a percentage of our traffic with our goal being to maximize it to maximize checkout conversion, so do stay tuned for that test. Now with that, we're almost at the end of our time together, and you'll see a survey come up on your screen shortly. So we really appreciate it if you could answer the two very brief questions. But what you've heard from us is about successful campaigns, Gen AI, the importance of sharing, page redesigns, and more. And now we wanna leave you all with a few things you can do today to reach those next steps of fundraising on JustGiving. So here they are, three things that you can do today. Firstly, think about how you can engage with crypto donors. For example, you can share the fact that you now accept crypto donations via JustGiving with your existing and potential donor base. Secondly, encourage your fundraisers to share, share, and share again. Remind them that each share is worth $81 in donations. That's pretty huge. And finally, let your fundraisers know about the QR code principal poster option. They can easily access this from their share options on their fundraising page, and it's already driving significant donations as you've seen. So that is everything from myself, Jackie, and Mat. If we haven't gotten around to any questions, we'll make sure to respond to these in the form of an email. So I do thank you all for your time today, so thank you very much. Cheers all. Bye.