The GlobalGiving UK Innovation fund

Dear friends,

“We are creative, hardworking and persistently optimistic that the world can be a better place for all” is what you can read these days in the Out of Office message of our CEO Eleanor Harrison (lucky to be spending time in Kenya also visiting some great GlobalGiving UK partner charities).

So what are the rest of the team stuck in the London office working on to justify the “creative, hardworking and persistently optimistic” statement?

We will give you just couple of examples, and you can judge if that statement stands.

Gateway Challenge: How we support new charities fundraise online

Hundreds of charities applied to join our Gateway Challenge, a fundraising competition that runs from 17^th November to 23^rd December. Needless to say, we spent many hours vetting their documentation and were happy to approve 43 applications from charities all around the world doing excellent work in their communities. After the vetting stage, we ran a month-long online training program to prepare the successful applicants for the challenge ahead and held a very successful workshop in London. All organisations participating in the Gateway Challenge that raise over £2000 from at least 50 donations until 23^rd December will become GlobalGiving UK partners.  

See them here. 25 days to go and they have already raised over £26,000. IDEALS, the organisation providing healthcare to Syrian refugees in Lebanon is currently in the lead. Breakthrough Trust, supporting girls in India, is only 4 donors away from passing the challenge. Great work! 

GlobalGivingTime: How we get hundreds of students to help our charities online

Next Tuesday, on the 2nd December, we will be running a UK-wide volunteering competition with hundreds of skilled volunteers using GlobalGivingTime, our online micro-volunteering platform. GlobalGivingTime volunteers helps our project partners with those technical, skilled tasks that they need help with. Volunteers, rather than offering money, offer their expertise and make an immediate, measurable difference to the work of grassroots organisations all over the world. We can’t wait to see how they interact this Tuesday, our charity partners have already posted 80 tasks they need help with!

Grassroots Leadership Programme: How students help us raise awareness of our programmes and we help them become more employable

Our student volunteering programme has just launched. Over the next year we will be working with 13 motivated and committed volunteers from universities in London, providing them with training so that they can raise awareness and funds for our great grassroots partners. In return, the students will gain employable skills like organisation, teamwork and leadership that will set them up for a job in this sector once they have finished university. We see these passionate young people as the grassroots leaders of tomorrow.

How we get great corporate partners to support our partner charities

On 4^th November, Nokia held a Senior Leaders Event in Berlin at which each delegate were given a choice of three GlobalGiving UK projects which they could sponsor with a gift of €1,000. The theme was to demonstrate Nokia’s commitment to technology that meets real human need. And the total sum to be gifted amounted to no less than €250,000.

Nokia approached GlobalGiving UK to suggest appropriate charities, organise a filmed presentation, and, finally, arrange the disbursements. We were given short notice and had just over two weeks in which to complete the project.

The first project selected is based in Rwanda. The objective is to promote employment through the sponsorship of young tech entrepreneurs. The goal of the second, in Ghana, is help to over 1,800 children progress to secondary school through the use of solar charged tablets and mobile libraries. Finally, in Mexico, where lack of access to the internet results in 75% of students never completing high school, the ambition is to open digital e-learning centres to connect and inspire poor communities currently excluded.

Calling on the resources of professional volunteers and with the amazing patience and speed of reaction of the charities involved, we were able successfully to deliver the required materials on time. The outcome was the projects in the individual countries gained the following percentages of the total: Mexico: 29.4%, Ghana: 45.9%, and Rwanda 24.7% of the €250,000 amount. Needless to say, the charities were thrilled with receiving this funding and we could not been happier we connected those who have the means to help to those who need help the most.

We are working on many more programmes to make sure our wonderful charity partners thrive, but we will save some stories for the next report.

Thank you very much for supporting our work.

Dear friends,

We have been incredibly busy since the last time we contacted you and thought we should let you know what we have achieved. Some highlights include our most successful fundraising campaign ever, our volunteer globetrotters, our own CEO running to raise funds for us, and an offer you can’t refuse: buy one goat and get one free! We kid you not.

None of this would have been possible without your support to this fund. 

Gateway Challenge success: how we help new organisations learn and fundraise online

Global Giving UK would like to express tremendous thankfulness toward all the 2027 donors who have contributed over £84,000 to the 25 organisations taking part in our Spring 2014 Gateway Challenge. 

All participating organisations had to go through a very strict due diligence vetting process, to make sure they are delivering great work in their communities. We have ensured they take part in our one-month online learning programme to prepare them for the fundraising campaign ahead: raising £2,000 from over 50 people within 5 weeks throughout May. And wait till you hear this: 17 organisations exceeded this fundraising target! This was our most successful Gateway Challenge to date, but just you wait for our next one. We’ll make sure we help even more organisations get invaluable funds to help their communities.

“We raised significantly more than we had expected. (After the learning programme) we felt much better equipped to effectively use our limited resources” Tanzania Development Trust, No Female Genital Mutilation! Safe House and Training Centre, Tanzania  

Route To Good mentoring programme: how we put professional mentors in touch with our charity partners

We are incredibly proud of this mentoring programme matching our partner organisations with communications and marketing experts from our company partner Dentsu Aegis network . These professionals will help our partner organisations over the course of 12-18 months to design and plan innovative solutions to their most pressing organisational needs, primarily focusing on marketing and communications. Exactly what most of partner organisations say they are struggling with. 

Volunteer Evaluation Programme: how we send volunteers to visit and help our partners around the world

After intensive preparation period, our 16 volunteers have finally set off to Lebanon, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, India, Nepal, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Tanzania and the UK.

They will be visiting some of GlobalGiving UK's NGO partners to monitor and evaluate their impact on the ground and help them build their digital communication resources, write up a comprehensive assessment of their training and development needs and prepare quality external audit reports for these organisations. Yes, we are keeping them very busy!

“So we arrived in India a few days ago. And wow has it been an experience so far… As soon as we explain we are doing charity work every person seems to adamant we should visit there friend’s friend’s nephew who could really do with our help. The idea that we might have a planned schedule before we jumped on a plane to India doesn’t seem to cross their minds clearly! But still it’s humbling to see how respected charity work is here."

Follow Belinda's journey via her blog. Those of us stuck in the office are very jealous. Aren’t you?

10k run in London this Sunday

We have great volunteers willing to go to great lengths for us: baking cakes, climbing mountains, and parachuting down from the plane, all to raise funds for GlobalGiving.

This Sunday 5 of them will be doing a 10 k run in London to support us. Not a marathon, but admirable indeed! You’ll find this interesting: one of them is our CEO, Eleanor Harrison. (Now, where does she find the time to do all this?)

All money raised will be added here, to GlobalGiving UK Innovation Fund: to develop new training and support projects for our partner NGOs and, in turn, allow them to maximise their impact. 

Buy one goat for a family in Darfur and we’ll donate another!

We are very proud to have been able to offer £6,000 worth of funds raised through our partnership with PayPal as matching funds for our partner organisation Kids for Kids and their wonderful project Goats and Donkeys Transform Lives in Darfur. We are matching pound for pound, until funds last.

Effectively, you can donate £37 to buy one goat for a family, and we’ll add another £37, so another family can get a goat too. Isn’t that wonderful? Two goats for the price of one, an offer you cannot refuse.

GlobalGiving UK Story Scribes

We will be out and about in London in July & August collecting community feedback and stories of social change. If you would like to volunteer to collect stories this summer, we would love to hear from you! We are offering free training on 15th July and 28th July. Please sign up here  to get involved. 

It’s always fun to end with wine

For those of you based in or around London, or those of you who may be passing through, please join our Blankets & Wine event in Regent's Park, 14th August, 4 - 6:30 PM. Enjoy interesting company, warm weather, live music and some superb storytelling. It's a great opportunity to talk about your organisation to a wonderful group of GlobalGiving friends. Please bring a blanket, some drinks and a few snacks.

I prefer Swiss dark chocolate, but crisps are fine too, I guess. RSVP.

It has been another busy few months in our GlobalGiving UK London office, busy programmes, campaigns, annual meetings, lots of international volunteers starting out. Our team members come from all over the world: UK, Portugal, Russia, France, Poland, Croatia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Venezuela, the US, Canada (I could go on)- the conversations get really exciting in our office with such an international team!

We would like to thank you once again for helping us to support our partner charities in doing their great work worldwide: it truly makes a difference.

Our recent ‘50% Bonus Week’ campaign for partners raised an incredible £36,367 for their projects: http://www.globalgiving.co.uk/leaderboards/bonus-week/.

Match funding campaigns are a great way to inspire donations, and this proved to be a fantastic opportunity for some of our projects to boost their fundraising. For the Mustard Seed Project in Kenya, this week was hugely important: in the seven day they made huge gains on their £10,000 target- not only did they receive an incredible £5,621 in donations, but this was boosted by nearly £2,000 match funding and a £1,000 bonus for coming in at the top of the leaderboard! This fantastic effort brings them much closer to building a new school where they can provide quality education and meals for 300 children in a Mombasa slum. 

We are entering yet another exciting period as we prepare to bring even more partners on board: we are currently building up to our Spring 2014 Gateway Challenge. This is a fundraising competition that will run from 1^st May to 5^th June, and all participating organisations that raise over £2000 from at least 50 donations in that time will become GlobalGiving UK partners. There is plenty to do before this can begin though: we thoroughly vet all of the participating charities and run a month-long online training program to prepare them for the challenge! This program consists of a course of sessions on topics relevant to online fundraising, helping these small charities improve their skills to make sure they can raise as much as possible. The charities that took part in our Winter 2013 Challenge did an incredible job- raising over £75,000 between them (from over 1500 donors)- so we are excited to see a repeat of this success!

"We were fundraising novices and so the training enabled us to go from nothing to executing a successful campaign.” Salem Union, Kazakhstan

“So very pleased we took part and look forward to a strong partnership in the future. Extremely useful training and learning. We are further along than we were.” Rajesh, Our Sansar in Nepal

Our Annual General Meeting held in February and was a great opportunity for us to connect with the wider GlobalGivingUK community and hear from our project partners. One of our volunteers that attended described it as a “wonderful opportunity for everyone to hear about each others’ successes: I learnt a lot from those that spoke and I am truly inspired by the fantastic things that our projects are doing!” It is events like this that allow us to hear about the genuine impact our partners have, and we can only thank you again for the support that you give: it is you who makes it all possible. Thank you. 

Thank you for supporting GlobalGiving UK Innovation fund and helping us to pilot new training and support projects for our partner NGOs, maximising their impact in their local communities.

You’ve helped us achieve the most successful Gateway Challenge to date (fundraising challenge for organisations new to GlobalGiving UK) and helped us add value to the work of so many overseas partner organisations through our Impact Assessment programme.

It was a long process, but we made it. Our Gateway Challenge was great success. After carefully selecting and thoroughly vetting applicant organisations this August and September, throughout the month of October we held a series of training sessions for the selected organisation in a range of topics (writing a great project page, pitching a project, social media and emails as fundraising tools, mapping supporter networks, preparing an online fundraising campaign). This training programme prepared the 25 selected organisations for the fundraising challenge ahead: raising £2,000 from 50 donors over the course of 5 weeks (ending 23rd December 2013). It was not easy, but these amazing organisations did it. Over 1500 people donated, raising over £75,000: http://www.globalgiving.co.uk/leaderboards/gateway-challenge-november-december-2013

Youth Star Cambodia from Phnom Penh Cambodia managed to raise over £10,000, also winning our £1,500 bonus prize. This will greatly help them recruit and coach Cambodian graduates to volunteer in underserved areas of Cambodia, setting up youth clubs and implementing campaigns to address community development issues and social issues, such as domestic violence and alcohol abuse. They would never have been able to raise this amount had it not been for the challenge, pushing them to connect to people they never thought would support their cause.

And remember our Impact Assessment Programme? We have sent six GlobalGiving UK volunteers to visit our overseas charities in Zimbabwe, India, Ghana, South Africa and Morocco and support thier work and impact measurement. This programme also helps us see exactly what impact your donations are making in the local communities. Listen to what our wonderful volunteer Chido Dziva Chikwari, travelling through Zimbabwe and helping our partner charities build their capacity, has to say about the work of Zimkids, Zimbabwe: “What I loved the most about Zimkids was the spirit of what I would like to call Family. The centre is literally Built by Orphans, Run by Orphans, For Orphans”. You can read her blog posts here and see how much fun the children at the centre are having: http://myheartsimpressions.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/a-picture-diary-of-my-week-with-zimkids.html

Neither our Gateway Challenge nor our Impact Assessment Programme would have been possible without your belief in these projects and your wish to make a difference! Thank you for all your support.

On that note the whole team at GlobalGiving UK, staffers and our wonderful volunteers, thank you and wish you a wonderful 2014!

There is never a dull moment in our GlobalGiving UK London office. If you could have a look at it now, what you would find are groups of volunteers delivering vital work for GlobalGiving UK, writing press releases, blog posts, grant applications, expanding our social media reach, reaching out to prospective partner corporates and new charities in need of support, and setting up story-telling events to allow all friends of GlobalGiving UK to get to know our partner charities (we hosted a beautiful Blankets and Wine event in Regent’s Park in London beginning of August). And that is not all. Six GlobalGiving UK volunteers are visiting our overseas charities in Zimbabwe, India, Ghana, South Africa and Morocco and thus are playing a key role in supporting impact measurement for our project partners and ourselves, allowing you to find out exactly what impact your donations are making in their local communities.

Furthermore, GlobalGiving UK is always looking for great new charities to partner with. We have been working hard on making sure everything is in place for our Gateway Challenge (18th November to 23rd December), a fundraising challenge that offers a chance for prospective partner charities to expand donor networks through GlobalGiving UK, receive 4 weeks of structured free training and support, and win bonus prizes of up to £4000. The deadline for applications is just a week away, so the team is very busy reaching out to new partner charities and looking at all the received applications, making sure their due diligence is thoroughly checked before they can start fundraising through GlobalGiving.co.uk. Kathryn Garnett, past Gateway Challenge participants and project leader of African Steps, a charity working to improve and sustain the provision of healthcare on Likoma Island in Malawi, said: “We thought the challenge was fantastic as it allowed us to raise a large amount of money in a short time, but also it has raised our profile enormously and increased our supporter base beyond our hopes.”

Without your dedication and support GlobalGiving UK would never be able to grow and help charities like this one in over 80 countries around the world significantly improve or even save lives in their local communities. Thank you for enabling GlobalGiving UK to make positive change happen.