Setting up your fundraising page

We use Virgin Money Giving as a fundraising platform to collect online donations. The benefit of this is that all the money is collected centrally and Gift Aid is claimed automatically. 

For this challenge you can create your own fundraising page related to the event and direct your supporters there to make a donation towards your individual appeal. If you would rather send people to the main page without creating your own that’s fine, but it is easier to keep track of if you create your own.

Here is a step by step guide to creating your own page:

Visit http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fund/glengoyne to open up our Glengoyne Lodge Appeal page. Click on “Start fundraising” at the top to begin the process.

If you already have a Virgin Money account you can log in at this point, otherwise you’ll have to provide a few details and register for a new account.

You’ll next be prompted if you want to create an individual fundraising page, or a page as a team. If you create one as a team you can add individual fundraisers to it, but all the donations will appear in one place. This would be good if you were fundraising as a workplace or family for example.

The next stage is you’ll be asked what you’re doing to raise money. You can just type “Virtual Tour of Scotland” and click next. This box doesn’t really matter but we can’t switch it off!

When you click “Next” you should be presented with a list of options for events – one of which (probably the top one) will be our event – “Virtual Summer Camp Tour of Scotland”. Just click on this to go to the next stage.

Almost done!

Next you’ll see Glasgow Disabled Scouts appear as the charity you are raising funds for. You can answer “no” to the next question, then choose whether or not you want to be kept on our mailing list after this event.

Then click “create my page”.

That’s it – your page has been created!

Next add some information to it so that people know what you are fundraising for. You might want to use some of the words from our guide to “telling the story” here.

Some top tips on the page itself:

• Upload your own profile photo and cover image to make it more personal, or you can use one of our standard images here. Try to make the profile picture yourself if you can – people are more likely to donate if they know who you are!

• Setting a target – our overall target is £250,000 but that is obviously very daunting to most people! So set your own personal target. Be realistic, but also ambitious. People donating to your page will see your own target and how much you have raised so far. Research has shown that fundraising pages with targets raise more money than those without – so think carefully about this step!

• Tell your story – you can use some of our words here to describe the project, but it is always more powerful and persuasive if your story is written by you personally. Why are you fundraising for us? If you have a direct connection, talk about it. People like to donate to people they know – so what’s your story?

• Remember to check back onto your page regularly to thank your donors and you can even update your story on how you’re getting on with the challenge.