In the thirteen years JustGiving has been around, we’ve seen a lot of fads and fashions come and go – remember those throbbing red donate buttons on home pages in the mid-noughties?

The trend that is here to stay is now so obvious that it is almost a cliché: giving has gone social. Each year people are now raising hundreds of millions of pounds, dollars and euros entirely off their own bat, telling their own stories and – almost literally – infecting others to follow suit. Mobile has tipped into the mainstream, fuelling story-telling and social sharing even further. The explosion of choice for fundraisers and donors is matched by a plethora of awesome technologies and tools for charities and non-profits themselves.

And yet, charities and non-profits continue to ask us every day: how does social really work? And does it work for fundraising? What are others doing that’s working well and, most crucially, not so well, so we can learn faster? And how do we convince the risk-averse leaders of our organisation to let us have a go at this?

Those questions show that adopting new tools may well be the easy part for a charity or non-profit going digital. To paraphrase American marketer Seth Godin, it is often our ways of working – the culture in our teams and organisations, in other words – that make all the difference between good and bad.

At JustGiving, we’ve been keenly aware of the impact of social, launching our first blog back in 2005 to share insight and advice with charities and fundraisers. Many hundreds of posts, hundreds of thousands of visits, and over 2 million page views later, we’re now focused on the art of making giving social.

So this blog, in a nutshell, is our invitation to charities and non-profits, and our friends interested in using technology for good, to explore how social giving works and how we can make it better. You’ll find not only how-to tips and step-by-step guides, but also different perspectives from a wide range of voices, aimed at making us do nothing else but sit back and think.

So welcome to ‘We make giving social’. Subscribe, read and enjoy – and do speak up if you agree, or better still, disagree with any of it.