Wednesday, December 19, 2007

£1 billion of projects!

Today we passed £1 billion of projects on theBigGive.org.uk. To have acheived this milestone in under 3 months (2 months and 19 days, to be precise) is an amazing acheivement, and hope the scale of interest in the site is a sign of many successes to come.

I would like to thank every charity (all 3,500 of you!) that has helped theBigGive.org.uk grow into such a useful tool for high wealth donors in such a short space of time.

As we continue to grow and develop, I look forward to working with our registered charities to improve the opportunities available to high wealth donors. If you have any comments or thoughts on the site, the project format or how your supporters react to your projects, please let us know by posting a comment on this blog.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are there plans to limit the number f charities and/or projects registered on the site. After all, what seems to make it valuable is that a degree of pre-selection and so manageable number so of projects are represented. Won't the value of The Big give be diminished as the number of appealing organisations increases?

Jon Brooks said...

We have no plans to limit the number of charities or projects, and one of the strengths of the site is the volume of organisations that donors can search through.

We are however looking at ways to improve the quality of projects on the site, and highlight these quality projects.

If you have any suggestions, please post them on the blog. We have benchmarked a number of websites, but if you see any fantastic features then let us know!

Anonymous said...

Browsing projects it seems there are a large number of quite poor quality submissions and also the categorisations used by the charities concerned are not always appropriate, presumably to try and increase the number of times they come up in searches by potential donors. Perhaps this should be controlled or moderated in some way? At present, there appears to be a real danger that the potential usefulness of the site will be undermined by a lack of quality control. Quality control could be by way of (1) moderation before posting (2) limiting the number of projects per charity (3) tighten use of categories (4) some sort of application process for charities to join (5) automatically archiving some projects if not proactively maintained or resubmitted after a period (6) automatically archiving projects that are not downloaded XX times in YYY days (7) making a project website and charity logo mandatory. I hope this is of interest. Overall TheBigGive is a brilliant initiative and is very professional, but its value needs to be protected, and a degree of exclusivity would help.

Jon Brooks said...

Thank you for your very useful comments. We are consulting with a number of experts in our focus on quality control, and your ideas will be fed into our discussions.

Currently we are working on (3) tightening the use of categories, and (5) rewarding those charities that keep their projects updated.

I will post on the blog when these changes are up, and please keep the feedback coming!