Congratulations Dotty Rhino

Almost a year ago, we started a charity website of the month feature on the charities blog, and the inaugural winner was the fabulous Dotty Rhino website.

It's strange reading something I wrote 12 months ago when I first started writing to this blog, but it's clear that we're not the only fans of the site... as the Dotty Rhino blog has just won "best african weblog" at the Eighth Annual Weblog Awards!

Now, the *bloggies* are pretty prestigious so this is a great award to receive - and if you look through the other winners, there are some pretty big name, huge traffic blogs up there. Plus, as far as I can tell, it's the only charity short-listed too!

But what's it about? Here's what the blog says:

Dotty Rhino is a real-life baby rhino living in a purpose-built rhino sanctuary in Tanzania. She and her friends are protected around the clock by Fitz and his dedicated crew who work incredibly hard to maintain water supplies, organise anti-poaching patrols and support the surrounding villages.

Dotty Rhino Humans work behind the scenes in an effort to educate and inspire young children to get involved in wildlife preservation and to introduce the world to the real Dotty Rhino.

Our Dotty Rhino Blog is unusual because it is aimed specifically at young children. This means we cannot observe several typical blog features… we never link to third-party external sites and we vet every single comment to ensure our site is safe for visitors of all ages.

So congratulations to Mandy and the team at Dotty Rhino for a great effort! :-) If you're a charity wondering how you might start blogging to reach out to your target audience and supporters, it's a great example to follow.

And here's to starting a new bloggies category next year for "best online fundraising weblog aimed at charities that use Justgiving, written by a guy called Jonathan"...