Fundraising pages are go! #FF @JustGiving

This is a really exciting day for Give A Brick. For months I’ve been dreaming about writing this post. Seriously. I’m so excited, I can’t type in full sentences! At first glance, today’s thing won’t be that big a deal for you. Bare with me though and I’ll explain. But first, the big announcement:

Give A Brick has joined

This means lots of stuff but (in my head at least) it means we can finally start living up to all the aspirational things I’ve been dreaming about. People coming here, reading about the brilliant stuff we’re doing and catching the vision.

Teaming up with Just Giving allows wonderful people like you to do something exciting in the name of Give A Brick. You can create your own fundraising page, add the Facebook app to your profile page and download the Just Giving app for your iPhone.

You can tweet and email all your friends and family from your fundraising page, asking them to support you as you support us.

You can even be one of the fabulous people who commits to giving a fixed monthly donation.

All this stuff is possible and super easy thanks to Just Giving.

Now there is a catch and it’s something I personally battled with a few months ago. Just Giving is our first regular admin cost. You’ve got to spend money to make money, I get all that. But because I’m on a personal mission to prove that you don’t have to have a massive budget to do lots of really good stuff, I’m very careful about every single penny we spend.

Just Giving costs £15 per month + VAT so with the current market, about £17.60 (around $28 according to the app on my phone.)

The great news is that Just Giving is set up such that when someone Gives A Brick via Paypal (currently the top donation method here on GiveABrick.com) we only lose 2p on every pound donated and (and this is a biggie) we get Gift Aid. With our own Paypal efforts we lose 22p and we can’t easily claim gift aid. (What is Gift Aid? Read about it here.)

Once we get this place running smoothly and being all lovely, shiny and compelling, Just Giving will pay for itself just by the way it saves us 20p on every single donation.

But what I’d really like is to find an amazingly kind company or individual who is willing to commit to donating that money on a monthly basis to pay for our use of the Just Giving service. If you know someone like that, please ask them to email me (el (at) giveabrick (dot)com) or they can set up monthly giving from our shiny new page on the Just Giving site.

That’s it for now. I have some more (very different but still super exciting) news for you tomorrow so if you don’t want to miss it, be sure to sign up to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or sign up to our sparkly new newsletter.

In the meantime, thanks for being with us thus far. Hold on to your hats, the next bit is going to be awesome!

And have yourself a fabulous day

P.S. If you’re not sure where to go next, check out our new What Do We Do? page or for my latest blog post, head over to Give A Brick friend Matthew Needham’s Big Red Tomato Company where yours truly has a guest post.