JustGiving’s GiveGraph to match donors to charities

JustGiving has unveiled a new platform that will enable the company to profile the activities of fundraisers.

GiveGraph analyses the data collected by the platform in order to make suggestions to donors – for example, if a person donated to an NSPCC fundraiser, it could be suggested that they might also like to give money to Barnardo’s.

This could be based either on the behaviour of others who have donated, or other charities the person they have sponsored has raised money for.

The charity fundraising platform said it hopes the initiative will increase the amount of money raised for all charities.

At an event to mark the launch of GiveGraph and Apps4Good, the organisation’s API initiative, JustGiving’s MD and co-founder Anne-Marie Huby said the organisation had “experienced a huge amount of growth” and now has eight million registered users, with around 100,000 new users signing up every week.

“Now we are setting out to address a much bigger question – which is how we can use the body of data we have been building up and leverage our extraordinary community of charities and causes… to enable causes to put [themselves] in front of the people who are most likely to care about them, intelligently and seamlessly,” she said.

According to Charlie Wells, JustGiving’s CMO, GiveGraph is the “world’s biggest graph of data about giving”.

In addition to 14 years of transactional data the organisation has gathered on the 44 million “people nodes” and 111 million connection nodes between them, GiveGraph is also fully integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph.

Jamie Parkins, consumer API manager at JustGiving, told PC Pro that the level of anonymity chosen by the person donating at the time they gave money would be honoured, and that anonymous donors wouldn’t be included in any graph matching.

The organisation also launched Apps4Good at the same event, an API platform that allows developers outside the charity sector to create apps that allow people to give money in different ways.

For example, Dare to Donate, created by Independents United, allows fundraisers to set different dares they would be prepared to do from “mild”, such as hopping in public for five minutes, to “extreme”, such as shaving your head or skydiving.