When we created the company in 1999, our dream was to enable any charity, however small, to use the web to raise money at very low cost. Almost no one believed it could be done. Nearly ten years later, we are proud to have helped over 6,000 member charities raise £370 million, mostly through online fundraising pages.

At 6.5 million and counting, our users are the largest community of online charity supporters in the world.

In 2003, we took our idea to the US and launched Firstgiving, now the fastest-growing member of the family.

We reinvest all our profits in the business, and our investors have yet to get a penny back. We’re very grateful to them for taking a pretty big risk and putting up with losses of £5 million to get us here.

Charities like our model because it’s simple and transparent, freeing them up to concentrate on what matters – whether it’s researching cancer or running the local playgroup. They know that we treat their supporters with respect, promising never to spam them, sell their personal data, or sell them anything. Charity fundraising is all we do.

As well as the website, we’re also real people on the phone and on email, ready to answer your questions and help you out. Yes, we’re really here, in central London - no annoying robots. If you’re in the area you can pop in for a cup of tea and, if you’re lucky, a slice of cake.

Our history

• 

  1999 Zarine, our CEO, decides to leave her posh city job to work full-time on this new-fangled internet charity idea she’s had. Everyone is used to the sound of a dial-up modem.

• 

  2000 Anne?Marie is so impressed with the idea that she leaves her top job at Medecins Sans Frontières to launch Justgiving with Zarine and a few other webby types, from a tiny office in Soho.

• 

  2001 The taxman gives our Gift Aid reclaim systems the thumbs up and we are ready to go. We process our first ever donation and have a big party.

• 

  2002 We make friends with the London Marathon folks and people start to take to the online sponsorship idea. We also win a NMA award for best use of the web. Yay!

• 

  2003 We launch in the US, to see if we can grow the online fundraising idea there, and work hard to make an impact. We redesign the UK site so people can raise money for anything, not just events. We discover usability and our userbase doubles.

• 

  2004 After investing millions in our systems, we break even for the first time. Woohoo! Cancer Research UK tries Justgiving on a bunch of their Race for Life events. They like it. We grow so much we have to move to a bigger office in Old Street.

• 

  2005 We break through the 1,000-charities mark, thanks to Justgivers and their friends wanting a wider choice of charities to support. We become the official online fundraising platform for Race for Life.

• 

  2006 We dabble with mobile phone donations for a bit. People don’t really want them so we undabble. Meanwhile the site gets bigger with lots of clever people using it for things like birthdays, weddings and parachute jumps. We get inspired.

• 

  2007 We get lots of new techies to start on the next generation of Justgiving and move office to St Cross Street. There is a great place down the road that does burritos. We launch a Facebook app and widget.

• 

  2008 We buy shiny new servers and start working in earnest on the next version of Justgiving. There are over 5,000 charities using our site and millions of people have helped raise more than 300 million! Amazing.