Day two of the Homeless Hacks fundraising challenge, and things are proving difficult.
I’ve created the Virgin Money Giving fundraising page – the charity we’re supporting, Action for Brazil’s Children, asked us specifically to use the Virgin site, not Justgiving (I wonder how many other charities do this?)
But the site is driving me mad. Parts of it are ‘temporarily unavailable’ whenever I try to use them. The site froze up when I tried to save the blurb I had written, so I lost it and had to write it again.
It took about half an hour to upload a picture onto the site. And the function that lets you email your contacts directly from the fundraising page is so frustrating that I ended up emailing my friends and family from my own account, and pasting a link to our page.
When I was writing the email, I had a bit of a dilemma: how strongly should I ask for sponsorship? I’ve heard plenty of people complaining that they’re inundated with sponsorship requests and feel guilty turning people down, so I didn’t want them to think I was pestering.
In the end, I opted for a clause at the end of the email saying people shouldn’t feel obliged to sponsor me but that if they did it would be much appreciated.
It’s been a day since I sent the requests, and we’ve had some really generous donations. But I’m very wary of not wanting to let the charity down by missing the £300 fundraising target we’ve been set, so we can’t afford to get complacent.
Sophie and I will keep blogging and tweeting and see how far that gets us. If the cash flow has dried up by tomorrow, we’ll have to think of offline ways of raising it – and pronto.
If you do want to sponsor us, visit our page.