heatherbird

Posted on: Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009



Update on the new JustGiving – Tuesday 23rd June

First of all, we’re really sorry about the problems that some of you have been having with the launch of the new site. We know how frustrating and worrying they have been for lots of you who are currently raising money and making donations, and we have our tech team working round the clock to fix them.

We’d like to give you an update on:
- what’s been fixed
- what’s outstanding
- how we tested the site before going live
- why we decided to launch on Saturday (20th)

1) These things are now fixed

- Email receipts, alerts and reminders are now being sent out. If you made a donation over the weekend, you will receive an email receipt from us by the end of the week. To make sure everyone receives a donation receipt, you might receive it twice, but don’t worry – it’s just for the one donation.
- Photos are now showing up on JustGiving pages
- Charity logos are now showing up on JustGiving pages
- Widgets are now working

2) These things are outstanding and being worked on right now

We are really sorry that some of you are having problems logging in. We’re working on it now and expect to have it fixed by the end of the day. For now, please follow our advice here.

There are still some problems with people seeing pages and making donations. These are being looked at urgently and will be fixed by the end of the day.

3) Testing

Some of you have asked us about our testing of the new site. We just wanted to let you know how we tested, because it’s one of the most important parts of any new release.

We’ve been through some really rigorous testing, but in any new website launch, the transition to live environment throws up issues that it’s just impossible to 100% guarantee against. Here’s Sunny Bhowan, who leads the testing:

“Here at JustGiving, we have conducted both function and load testing on the site in our testing environment, and finally we tested through a replica of the production environment. During our extensive load testing we replicated millions of requests on our system – we performed saturation tests as well as sustained load tests. We take a test-driven approach to our development, building unit tests and functional integration tests to ensure that all changes to our application are fully regressed.

Over the past year, our core technical teams have, at every point of the new build, gone through both usability and functionality testing processes. We are grateful everyone who has brought to our attention the issues and shortfalls you’ve found. We can assure you that each and every piece of feedback and comment is being looked at by a team member from our in-house pool of experts to provide a solution.

Our website is your website and together we will work to meet your expectations and help you to achieve your goal, which is to raise much-needed funds for your chosen charities.”

4) Timing of the new site

We’ve been asked why we chose Saturday 20th June to deploy the new site. Unfortunately, there is a never a perfect time to launch an ambitious project like a new site with new technology – it will always coincide with some events. We looked really hard at when the least impact for you would be, and while there are plenty of events in June, we find it’s a relatively less busy month than the rest of the year.

Here’s Zarine Kharas, our CEO:

“I know that many of you have suffered a high degree of extreme frustration and I really am sorry for that. Thank you for bearing with us through these first few days of teething problems. We’re confident they will be resolved – this might just take longer than we originally thought. But the end result will be a much-improved site that helps you raise even more money for the cause you’re passionate about. Please believe me when I say that we really have got people working all night and all day to get these things fixed.”

As soon as we’ve fixed everything that’s not working at the moment, we’ll be working on more adjustments to the site, so we would really appreciate your feedback. Please send your ideas to suggestions@justgiving.com

Finally, Liz Kessick, who has been involved in the redesign of JustGiving, will be posting tomorrow to explain more about the choices involved in the redesign.

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  • R

    Agree with all the negative comments. Regardless of how hard people are working, some extremely poor choices (technical, design) were taken, and you have to suck up the pressure you’re getting.

    Just revert to the old system, for goodness sake!

    Quite apart from the horrible technical problems, your new design is vile. Previous version was clean, simple, lots to see on the first screen visible without scrolling, readable comments (not in nasty coloured boxes), could see both the comments and the total on the same page, etc. Tim’s remarks above all extremely valid. Useability – down by a long way. Visual feel – revolting. Somebody needs firing for choosing this way to redesign. Yuck.

  • http://www.equi-therapy.net Fiona

    Absolutey appalling!!!!

    Will we ever see the missing donations? I have had frends tell me that they have donated over the weekend but their donations have not appeared.

    I tested with a donation myself & did not get the option to add gift aid or to pay by paypal – but my donation has shown up.

    I emailed a lot of people on Saturday with sponsorship requests – what bad timing – I won’t get a second chance with people. My charity will lose hundreds of pounds over this issue.

  • Alan Davies

    Well most of my anger and frustration has been covered by everyone else. What has really got me down is that my challenge was at the weekend. Like most other people in my situation, I’ve been focusing all my energy towards this weekend over the last 9 months and the final push “remember I’m doing this at the weekend” is completely wasted.
    In my experience, charity events usually take place at the weekend so why not change the site over mid week? That way if there are problems you might have them fixed before the event itself. June quiet? Don’t think so – you can’t compare the rest of the fund raising year against the London Marathon that’s ludicrous! I believe there are lots of events attempting to take advantage of the weather in June.
    As far as the “improved” site is concerned – the old site had a welcoming hand built feel about it. The new logo isn’t flash enough to tick the professionalism box nor is it “cutesy” enough to be warm and friendly. The so called amazing new thermometer looks really awful to me and increasing the space taken up by donations and text but actually showing less of both is just daft. As another contributor noted we put a huge amonut of effort into striking the right tone in the words used and to only be able to see half of them is maddening.

  • http://www.muppetrally.co.uk Alex Jevon

    I’ve just noticed that the image I was using as a link to my justgiving site has now changed its location, thereby breaking the links on two blogs I run. You say Widgets are now working, but in my experience they’re not, thanks to this one file moving. If I hadn’t have noticed this, we’d have lost out.
    Added to this our page is up and down like a yoyo at justgiving.com/wackbangerrally
    Your previous site was fine. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

  • http://paristomontecarlo John Jennings

    As someone who has been responsible for implementing large tech change programmes, I am sympathetic with your situation – up to a point. Page loading and login issues are one thing, being unable to make payments is another and is quite unacceptable given the nature of your business.

    From a personal point of view, I estimate that these issues have cost our charity, Macmillan, over £1000 in donations as we had a big campaign over the weekend with a charity summer ball and over 1000 emails sent asking for donations.

    I have now had 20-30 mails and numerous calls saying people cannot donate. With just a week to go until our main event, this is little short of a disaster for us. I would like to know if the proceeds from the 0845 number can be donated to us to compensate for the lost donations. No doubt other fund raisers would benefit from this and it would go a considerable way to repairing your damaged image.

  • Alan Davies

    CONTINUED: There is little or no improvement as far as photos are concerned and they are a real benefit to boosting fundraising. Even the most basic forum sites have better photo ability than this. Overall the design functions are really dull and make it difficult to make tempting. Ultimately we are trying to “sell” our events and I’m no web designer but I could make a better fist of it than this. I am a regular eventer and I think JG needs to take a look over the fence at what your competition are doing – I think I’ll be going there next time.

  • http://www.lizrice.com Liz Rice

    Just wanted to add…

    * A word of encouragement to the folks at JustGiving – I’m sure you’re pulling out all the stops to get everything fixed: good luck.

    * Another word of encouragement to JG design team regarding complaints about the way the new site works – I’ve been involved in other site relaunches and you always have a lot of people complaining to start with. I’d agree that the old site was looking a little tired and it was due a refresh – and I’m sure there are plenty of folks who would disagree. The key thing will be to see how your metrics compare in a couple of weeks’ time to a year ago, once everything has settled down.

    * Having said that (and I’m again speaking from experience) it does seem odd not to have run a beta test phase where both sites were available in parallel. There have been some pretty fundamentally broken things that would have easily been shown up in a beta test process. Is it too late to allow people to revert to the old site if they are having problems?

    * I do agree with an earlier comment from Tim about the reformatting of the pages we’ve carefully built, to the point where our text is being split into two pages. If I could actually get in to edit my page I’d do so to make it work better in the new format, but I can’t….although it’s kind of irrelevant since at the moment it seems no-one can donate on my page anyway.

    Pete – see you at the London to Paris ride :-)

  • http://www.lizrice.com Liz Rice

    One more thing – never mind about the costs of 08xx numbers (a subject I got a bit aerated about recently, incidentally – http://lizrice.blogspot.com/2009/05/08-what.html)

    I know for sure that most of the people I’ve asked to donate would be a lot more comfortable donating online, and frankly won’t bother with picking up the phone, however much it costs.

  • Skew

    We’ve given up. Go here

    http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/

    Simple site that works.

  • Adrian Bardsley

    I have tried over & over again to log in to manage my page, after following your advice about cookies etc & its failed every time.
    Re alternatives such as taking cash money can I point out that there are other web providers of a similar service to JustGiving such as http://www.charitygiving.co.uk and as a fall back it might be a good idea to set up a mirror page on that for sponsors who are unable to donate via JustGiving.

  • pete

    for those who have subscribe to this thread, there is a new update just been posted

    http://blog.justgiving.com/2009/06/24/new-on-justgiving/update-on-the-new-justgiving-wednesday-24th-june/

    Interestingly now when I try and access my page I get redirected to the host http://original.justgiving.com/ but get a 404 page not found. Maybe they have taken note of all the unhappy people and are in the process of setting up the old site which worked while they can work through the issues with the new site.

    Fingers crossed my page starts working again soon :-)

  • dannielle

    I have tried twice now to donate for my friends charity run. I know the first didn’t go through on Saturday and I have no idea if today’s attempt was successful. Both times I entered my card details so I could end up donating twice. How does that get sorted? I have tried your 0845 number but it just rings and then cuts off. Updates are never perfect straight away but if you are going to issue a number for people to check their donations have gone through at least answer the phone.

  • http://www.miscarriageassociation.org.uk Ruth Bender Atik

    This is so disappointing. We have lived for ages with the frustration of being timed out of JG pages (because of taking a phone call in the middle of something) and repeatedly having to log back in. But that was small fry compared to what’s happening now. After days of chaos, today’s message lists all the things that are working properly. The only thing is that they’re not – I still can’t get in to a whole range of fundraising pages.

    As for design – I agree with comments already made re the page-owner’s text being limited (irritating), unclear (colour, font size), and the donations page showing only the latest transactions. The previous version gave a much stronger impression of the sheer number of donations.

    This is really bad news, JG and a great shame considering how much we have gained from the company up till now.

  • Dipti

    Hurrah I can see my sponsorship page. However still cannot get into my account to make any updates.

    Did Justgiving do any pilot survey on what charities or general public would like to see on their donation page?

    My story – you should be able to see your full story rather asking donors to click on read more.

    List of Donation received – like other comments on this page you should be able to see full details of sponsors to date, rather asking people to click on next button.

    I know my charity have lost out on donation to date, as people are getting frustrated with error message appearing.

  • http://rhydian-roberts.co.uk Susan

    The updated blog says: “JustGiving pages are now accessible.”

    Not so. I have just tried yet again to access my page at 12.58 and still getting the error message:

    “We’re really sorry for the problems you’re having with our site.
    We’ve recently had a major update and we still have some issues that need to be resolved. We promise we’re working around the clock to fix these”

    As for the comment in the blog at the top of this page:

    “As soon as we’ve fixed everything that’s not working at the moment, we’ll be working on more adjustments to the site, so we would really appreciate your feedback.”

    You are kidding us, aren’t you?

  • http://www.justgiving.com/mikeburn3peaks Mike

    The most disappointing and frustrating thing for me here is that had JustGiving had the courtesy to notify users that an upgrade was planned, I would have held off on sending out emails and text messages on Saturday, while en route to our 3 Peaks Challenge. Several people tried to log on to make donations in response to those last minute requests, and so far, none of them have yet been able to make a donation as my page has been unavailable.

    This has clearly lost huge amounts of money for charities, and has certainly also lost goodwill for JustGiving. I am doing 2 more events later this year, and will not be using JustGiving for those, as if this has happened once, it can happen again. What a shame, because most of the mess could have been avoided by proper communication (let alone proper testing).

  • pete

    To be fair they did send out a message on the 10th of June saying the site was changing and leading up to the change there was a link telling people to view what the new site was going to look like.

    However, like most people I just ignored this thinking “Oh, they are just adding some new features, neat”.

    I definitely agree with the feedback that the new site design is too heavily focused on the money aspect instead of the story behind the person trying to raise the money

  • http://http//www.justgiving.com/markandsteve_100miles Mark Shaffer

    Blog of 24th – please *stop* calling these teething problems – it’s far worse than that – perhaps a symptom of the wrong attitude being shown throughout your organisation?

    Still no real detail about what actually went wrong and why your “testing” didn’t show up any problems and why you didn’t roll back. I’ve emailed Zarine and Dominic directly as well as the helpdesk and no response…the least that we could expect is a full and open statement from senior management surely….

  • http://www.justgiving.com/rachelemauro Rachele

    The donations problem is a very serious issue!!!!!!!!
    I have the same problem as Jo Green, Fiona and many others that I have written on the blog (people donating getting confirmation and amount not appearing on my site). I managed to get through someone this morning and I have been told that my sponsor has to try again. But even more people are now donating on my site and are having the same problems. We are talking about hunderds of pounds lost and not sure if people will be bothered donating again…just because the site doesn’t work.
    A very bad launch and at an extremely bad time with the London to Paris event happening in 2 days!!! The old site wasn’t as good in the design, but it worked. As this is about charity I think functionality and ensuring the donations go to the charity should have been in your number 1 priority when testing!!!!!

  • Sue Chessher

    I wish I’d known that the website was being re-designed this weekend. My company sent out an all-staff e-mail late Friday requesting sponsorship for an event taking place that night. I’m really concerned that people tried to sponsor me and gave up because of the difficulties. And why was it only TODAY that I discovered what was going on. Also, what’s with the strings of coloured liquorice in the photograph. Can somebody enlighten me as to what these are?

  • http://justgiving.com/overthetop2009 Keith

    Very very dissappointing.. Like many people I have had to send out apology emails to the 100′s of people that I have asked to donate to my cause. It becomes very intrusive on their time and makes them less likely to donate. I have seen all the notes from executives of Just Giving saying how sorry they are, but these words are meaningless. I have seen the notes from the IT team about how much they tested, and they are laughable…At the moment all we are getting is lip service, promising a better service and saying that all will be better in the future.. That is too late for my charity.

    So here is my challenge – if Just Giving really is sorry for this absolute debacle, why don’t they offer to waive, or at the very minimum, substantially reduce their fee against all donations for the last few days. Whilst I do not think that even this goodwill gesture would recoup all the money that my charity has lost, but at least it would show some understanding of how angry and upset this has made people and how their “service” has let people down. Does anyone agree ?

  • Peter

    I am completely flummoxed. JG has one of the highest transactions fees for online donor fundraising and I guess I expected more for that sort of money. Given the fees we were a bit on the fence about them, but this cinches it. We will no longer encourage our supporters to use the site. Anyone know if any other good platforms? I’ve tried dojiggy, but was not to happy about that.

  • Dipti
  • Shawn

    Can’t believe what a total shambles the upgrade is.Like almost all on here, I much prefered the old style where the full story and list on donators could be seen…..Imagine how many click throughs you would have to do on Phil Packers Page!!!

    My event is due to take place on Saturday (fortunately I have spent 3 months drumming up donations) but I was hoping for a bumper last week which just isn’t happening. One hardy soul managed to get through the minefield, but have lost countless others that I know of…..Don’t feel like I can do a last big mailshot as I just don’t believe I can trust the reliability of the site.

  • Mark GuideDogs

    Any news please? I want to send out a mailshot and have been holding off because of the disastrous update. I will only do it when you give the all clear, as people will refuse to waste loads of time donating unsuccessfully, and will be loathe/forget to try it twice.

    Upgrade problems are understandable, it is IT after all. However, it’s the humans behind it who should have had a back up. As my friend, Mr Hindsight, says, when your business is based solely around the giving donations over the web, the technology really needs to be ‘always there’, even in it’s basest form.

    I’m sure you are all doing your best, but regular updates, however trite and unspecific, do help us frustrated users to be more forgiving.

  • Kevin

    Currently (1.30pm on 25th June), everyone’s fundraising pages are inaccessible (randoming clicking on friends’ pages has not found a single one that works).

    There’s no access to personal accounts either, although our charity’s account is working OK.

    I really wish I hadn’t sent out an e-mail asking for support yesterday!

  • Kevin

    A quick PS

    You can access the ‘old’ format of fundraising pages through Justgiving’s secure subdomain

    Click on https://secure.justgiving.com/blowe4bkit and you’ll see what I mean

  • Pingback: JustGiving - Raise money for charity online

  • sc

    Website is completely unusable with the opera web browser

  • heatherbird

    Hi Kevin,

    Thanks for your comment about accessing your old JustGiving page via the hostname secure.justgiving.com.

    The ‘secure’ and ‘original’ host names are being used for charity-branded pages that are still live under the old system. While it is possible to view your old JustGiving page this way and make a donation that part of the system is really reserved for those charities. We can’t guarantee that donations made through those pages that are not charity branded will be correctly processed.

    To make sure your donation is processed properly, we strongly advise that you use the http://www.justgiving.com URL.

  • julie sansome

    Hi – a small thing i guess in the grand scheme of things and seeing just how many problems there have been – - but my badge isnt linking/working – - is the image still at http://www.justgiving.com/design/1/images/badges/justgiving_badge10.gif ???

  • Leana

    Can you let me know the timescales to sort out this problem? I am entered into a charity event next satuarday and have no other way of collecting donations apart from your site. so far I have a grand total of £20! Totally gutted!!

    As soon as I click on my page I get an error message so I cant even click on to see the content.

    Can someone look at it? an update would be nice to knwo someone is looking at my problem. Not a very good ‘new’ site is it!

  • Helen

    Why was there no update yesterday. It’s nearly a week since the update and the issues still haven’t been resolved.

    People still can’t donate. If I search for my name the system says there are no results !!

  • john amandini

    STILL no Pay Pal link! What a shambles Just revert tot the original set up. It waas clear consise and most impotantly of all, it worked.
    John amandini

  • sarah

    I can’t even set up a page now for my daughter. I get some random web page link even after its accepted her name and saying its available.

    http://www.justgiving.com/rashassan-13sdafd
    Whats that all about? Not good people, not good

  • http://justgiving Nigel Doggett

    I suggest you change your website about how wonderful you are winning awards etc until you get this sorted out. It is acutely embarrassing to write and rewrite to friends saying things are now fixed when clearly they are not; no access to site, some payments going through and not showing, some double payments etc. My key event was on Sunday, so lead up week and pre-week were absolutely ruined by this. It would also be nice to have the courtesy of a response to some of my emails. Nigel

  • http://www.justgiving.com/shermanhyde jason hyde

    This web page has been a hassle from the start. Many friends not being able to access it and many who have donated and not showing up.
    Now when you go onto the page it says that you have either typed in the address wrong or the page has been cancelled!!
    This is appalling, and for such a sensitive appeal as mine is, I am totally devastated at the problems we have been having.
    Please sort it out. Or just scrap your new system and go back to the old.

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