As I mentioned on Tuesday, Justgiving's (sadly soon to be departing) Head of Client Services Tom Mansel-Pleydell, gave a great presentation at the Institute of Fundraising's National Convention.
Due to some tech gremlins at the convention, Tom wasn't actually able to show his slides, but still gave a typically charismatic and informative talk. I was there, trust me :-)
Actually, don't take my word for it, read what Sara Gaines of the Guardian wrote about it in a piece entitled Charities urged to harness social media. It starts...
Charities are having to cope with a fundamental shift in power as
unnofficial advocates launch appeals and bring in donors through social
media, a fundraising expert said today
But here (a day late) are those slides:
And yes, Tom was (is) that *expert*. But the debate about social media and charities is certainly raging today. Over on the Intelligent Giving blog, Adam Rothwell writes an interesting and (typically) thought-provoking post entitled The internet: charities still don't get it.
Indeed, "the near-unrelenting terribleness of the charity’s world’s blogosphere" as he puts it, is something that's featured (from a different angle) in this week's Third Sector.
They asked Chris Arnold, Third Sector columnist and executive creative director of ethical marketing agency Feel, to rate four prominent charity sector blogs (this one, that one, the one over there and the one that used to be here but now isn't)
Personally, I'll leave all that to Technorati, but he also goes on to say...
A good blog has to come from an individual. The beauty of a
blog is being able to read one person's views. I hate corporate blogs -
they always sound as if they are written by the PR department. They are
so fake, and they feel like a cheap sales pitch.
Ouch. Note to *corporate* blog self - must stop those cheap sales pitches (this is the point when our imaginary PR dept steps in and tells me to cut that bit out)...
Moving swiftly on, over on the Charity Place, fundraising consultant Rachel Beer asks Is this the tipping point for UK charities’ adoption of social media?
Besides being nice about my one man mission to twitter updates from the convention (you're welcome), she wanted to see whether social media would be high up on the agenda for charities:
I’m only hoping that enough charities will have attended at least one seminar where social media was on the agenda during the Convention, and that this will have opened the UK sector’s eyes up to the potential of these platforms and removed some of the barriers in people’s minds about giving them a try.
As Adam also said,
The web allows charities to communicate more effectively than ever. But many seem keen to pass up this opportunity.
So the question is then, how do charities get involved in social media? The first place I'd go is Beth Kanter's blog, since her blog tagline is "Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media" and she's working on a project called We Are Media with NTEN, which is described as
a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world
Very interesting stuff, well worth a read (and participation).
Ok, so this post has gone pretty long now, but there are so many questions about how subject of social media can be got out to those reluctant (or too busy) to listen that it's hard not to go on.
From my own personal experience, I'd say it depends on someone *evangelising* the concept of social media and demonstrating examples of its use - that's how people got me into social media and the amazing world of the internet.
Even an old-fashioned email (like my attempt to explain twitter to some JG-ers: Download tweeting_from_the_iof_national_convention.htm) can get others enthused to learn and be a starting point for a wider conversation.
I mean, can you remember the first time someone told you about this new thing called the *internet* or *electronic mail*? Aren't we just repeating those same conversations but with a different subject?
A quick history lesson
