JustGiving CEO pledges refund over upgrade cockup

@sean...

...because they have to pay for hardware, staff, software and bandwidth maybe?

@Sean & El Reg

Massive epic FAIL to both of you.

Let's just get one thing straight here, Sean. Students, or in fact any volunteer fund raiser collecting change in buckets are not paid for what they do, the law states pretty clearly in the Police, Factories (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1916 that charity collectors must be volunteers. Some charities, in accordance with the law, do refund travel expenses but this is capped and regulated by the law as well. The provisions of the law also ensure that charity collectors use a sealed vessel which is only opened in the presence of two or more people. All collections must be signed off by an accountant and details of all monies received are given to the council which issued the permit within 28 days.

And why should justgiving take 1/20th? It's pretty simple actually, they have costs that they need to cover and they have to pay a fee for card processing. Unless you have the resources and the generosity to offer the service for free I suggest you get back in your troll box and stop embarrassing yourself.

I suspect El Reg is having a little tantrum because nobody at Justgiving gave them any attention, that's the only reason I can think of for the tone of this article. Justgiving had a bad upgrade and they have taken responsibility, offered to refund charges as a gesture of goodwill to the charities that rely on them and have set about sorting out their systems, what more do you want?

I have used Justgiving for quite a while now (if you fancy sponsoring me for my latest adventure go to http://www.justgiving.com/jailbreak4kidscan ) and have several friends who work for charities around the country. The upgrade has been a pain in the ass but the response from Justgiving and their determination to fix the problems and make good on their responsibilities to fund raisers has been nothing short of outstanding so why don't we all quit our bitching and get back to raising money for good causes.

fair do's

at least they are copping up that they plain old buggered up and didnt try and blame it on somebody else

nice to see some hohnesty tbh

So...

What technology did they migrate from and to?

Bet it was from dodgy old CGI that worked to fancy new J2EE that doesn't...

@Gaius

I have it on good authority that it was asp to asp.NET

with all due respect to el reg

This has actually been pretty disastrous - the system has been effectively down for about 10 days now - with people simply unable to make donations. As any fule kno - if people don't donate when the whim strikes them, they are unlikely to go back and do it at a later date - charities have lost huge amounts of money and goodwill from this - seemingly simply because justgiving was too proud to roll back to the previous version while they sorted out the problems with the upgrade.

Notwithstanding the fact that the "upgrade" is several steps back in many ways - most egregiously, it is no longer possible to see all donations on one page - you only see ten at a time, and scroll through them clicking next (don't we all love clicking "next"???) - as most users don't bother to click next, they only see the ten most recent donors - now where I work, people tend to give based on what they consider their peers to have given...however the ten most recent donors have been giving less than other people...which means that effectively the donating level has been lowered due to the "click next" feature.

so...yes surely, people who provide a service to charities deserve to make a profit if it's a good service...but this has been handled terribly, with very little openness, and cost a number of charities a good deal of dosh...

Anonymous posting as am currently raising money and work closely with a charity which gets (or got...) a lot of funds through justgiving.