6pm Finishes - They're The Worst!

Now that I have decided on the charities I will be raising money for the next decision is how exactly to go about that. Considering I don’t plan on coming back to England it pretty much means that online fundraising is the only way to go. Therefore I was left with the decision on which platform I would choose. I won’t name the ones I decided against as they are probably very worthy but just not for me – I have decided to use justgiving.com.

The only problem with using justgiving.com is that I have to set up 4 individual pages so that each charity has its own page so that the donations definitely go to the right place. Apparently the reason they don’t group charities together is due to the Gift Aid – apparently it causes some kind of some confusion somehow.

So, with that decided, I then thought about how I could get this to link into my blog. Although I will have the pages on justgiving.com it would be good if people could donate directly from my site. Also, I thought it would be a nice touch if I could place some widgets in my blog to show how much has been raised so far per charity. After discussions with the I.T. guys in work I am confident that we can put something together to take care of this. I am not 100% sure if the payments will be taken directly on my blog or whether there will be a clickable link that opens the payment page from justgiving.com in a new window.

I have spent the majority of this evening on Facebook trying to publicise my group as much as I can – I am now up to 312 members so it has doubled in size in the last 48 hours. I am hoping to reach 1,000 members by Friday night and, considering the rate at which the group is growing and the fact that there are now 1,384 invitations outstanding, I think that this may well be possible. I feel that to get 1,000 members in a week would be a fantastic achievement and I am hoping that the group will snowball from there.

It’s been a couple of lazy days for me and Roman so far this week so I plan to take him for a 4 mile run after work tomorrow. I finished at 6pm today so, by the time I walked home, it was already getting towards the evening. I hate finishing at 6pm, it always feels like I have no time to do anything. I used to finish work at 4pm everyday – that was brilliant as I could go on 8 or 10 mile walks with Roman before tea time. Now, it’s difficult to work it in as if we go straight after work I don’t eat until late and if we wait until after I have eaten we don’t get back in until late.

Working until 6pm is one thing I won’t miss when I leave at the end of the month. I don’t work everyday until 6pm – Mondays and Thursdays are until 5pm, Tuesdays and Wednesdays until 6pm and Friday until 5.30pm. I really used to enjoy finishing at 4pm – it felt like I had a whole day ahead of me but now it just feels like everything is a rush every night.

I have had a break from learning Italian this week – there is so much to organise and so little time!! I am going to start again this weekend. I am hoping that if I put a lot of effort in now trying to publicise this then things will pick up themselves pretty quickly after that.

So, the agenda for tomorrow will revolve around sorting the charity stuff out, exercise and publicising what I am doing again. I need to speak to a representative from each of the 4 charities and would like to get the pages set up on justgiving.com ready for people to start using. It would be nice to get the widgets sorted on my blog too but that may have to wait until Thursday.