Virgin Money Giving Blog

One of the features we built into Virgin Money Giving allows charities to create their own ‘mini-sites’ on and add as much content to as they like. We designed them so they could be branded up and charities could add extra pages.

Charities have been using them for a while now so we thought we’d post our top 5 tips on how to make the most of your area of the site and share some great examples with everyone else.

Our top 5 tips

1. Turn your page the colour of your charity
   Choose your charity’s colour, or a colour that compliments your logo and we’ll apply this to the header, footer, and navigation area of your page. There’s a colour picker in your charity account which you can use to choose a colour, or if you have brand colours you can either enter these by their RGB values, or the Hex Code. If you’ve got a marketing or brand team they will be able to provide these for you.

   There’s a help guide showing you how to do this too.

2. Show people what you do
   To help communicate the message of what your charity does and who it supports, use pictures. There are a couple of ways you can add images to your page. If you have a collection of photos you want to share, why not add the photo gallery widget. You just need to add the pictures you like to a gallery on Google’s free Picasa service, which you can either do first, or through our web-site when you’re creating your page. There’s a help guide on adding photos to your page

   You can also add images into the content you add on your charity page.

3. More than just a description
   When you first create your charity account on Virgin Money Giving we’ll automatically add the description you entered as part of registration to your charity page, but you can make it so much more than this. You can add as much information to your page as you like about what your charity does and how the money raised will make a difference.
    
4. More to say? Add more pages
   You can add as many extra pages to your charity page as you like. Either do this to add more content about the work your charity does, or your fundraising activities. If your charity has guaranteed places in events such as the Virgin London Marathon, or the Royal Parks Half Marathon why not create a page for this? You can use the space to tell fundraisers how to apply for one of your places and what support you can provide for them too.
    
5. Spread the word
   Tell your fundraisers you’re on Virgin Money Giving. Make sure you link to your charity page on Virgin Money Giving from your own website, Facebook group, emails and anywhere that you mention online fundraising. We’ve got some buttons which you can make use of here.

Some great examples

Looking through some of the charity sites here are a few that caught our eye.

We’d love to know what you think of the charity page features or if your charity has built a page you really like why not share it with us, post a comment to the blog or email feedback@virginmoneygiving.com.