A snip from Diana Mackie – PR Manager at the Institute of Fundraising

The basics: New technology will enable a range of fundraising trends in 2012; online giving is rightly a focus but its important not to lose sight of the basics involved in raising money.

Key areas include:

consistent communication of your charitys brand,

excellent donor care processes

an investment in individual fundraisers training and development to ensure practitioners are up to speed with the rapidly changing public sector landscape.

Ultimately, online is just one channel a charity can use to communicate and raise money. Direct marketing, for example, still remains a useful tool for many charities, as does the traditional donor newsletter either in hard copy or distributed electronically.

via Best bits: What 2012 holds for your charity – and you | Voluntary Sector Network | Guardian Professional.

Online fundraising platform JustGiving can now tell us which social media sites drive the most donations and which drive the highest average donations.

According to the sites own data, donors reaching JustGiving from Twitter are the most generous in that they give the highest average amount of £30.26.

People on Facebook however are more frequently persuaded to give via JustGiving.

The average values of donors giving on JustGiving following a call to action through social networks are:

Twitter – £30.26

YouTube – £28.77

LinkedIn – £25.21

Facebook – £18.33

Google+ – £17.77

via JustGiving reveals average donation values of social media shares | UK Fundraising.

More than a million extra people donated to charity in the last financial year, but even so the total value of donations made by the British public remained flat at £11bn.

The UK Giving 2011 report, released this morning, found that the level of giving in 2010/2011 was the same as that of the previous year and down £900m in real terms on the pre-recession high of 2007/2008.

Despite low consumer confidence throughout the period, the proportion of British adults giving reached previous highs of 58 per cent from a low of 54 per cent in 2008/2009. In any given month over the past year an average of 29.5 million people donated to charity in the UK. This represented a 1.1 million increase on 2009/2010 levels, but given that the average amount given per month slipped from £12 to £11 year on year, this increase in the number of givers did not push the needle on the total amount donated by individuals.

via One million more people giving, but total donations flat – Civil Society – Fundraising – News – providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits.

Through this programme, eligible UK-based charities are able to request donated technology products from Partners such as Microsoft, Symantec and Cisco.

The products include operating system software and server software, security software and hardware products such as switches, routers, wireless equipment and firewalls.

CTT and TechSoup are actively working to further expand the programme to include donations from other leading corporate technology donors.

Charities are required to pay a small Administrative Fee to cover the costs of the programme. Whilst the administrative fees vary, charities will still make savings of between 92-96% on typical retail prices.

via About CTX | Charity Technology Exchange CTX.

One million people have rounded up their pizza, toy and travel purchases to the pound for charity in the first year of the Pennies scheme.

In an event in London this morning marking the first anniversary of the initiative, Alison Hutchinson, chief executive of the Pennies Foundation, revealed that just over £250,000 has been raised by those million transactions.

The Pennies scheme, launched last year by the Pennies Foundation, involves customers using cards for payments rounding up their purchases to the nearest pound with the change going to the charity of the retailers’ choice.

via A million shoppers donate with Pennies in year one – Civil Society – Fundraising – News – providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits.