DSC adds more facilities to governmentfunding site
Howard Lake | 7 July 2004 | News
The Directory of Social Change is adding a bulletin board and a searchable directory of users to its governmentfunding.org.uk Web site.
Governmentfunding.org.uk, the Web site that helps charities find and apply for funding from several government departments, has added a bulletin board facility. This lets registered users discuss issues related to statutory funding and the Web site itself.
Given there are 9,700 registered users of the Web site, there are very few discussions so far. Only 14 topics of discussion have been started, with just 22 individual messages. Still, UK Fundraising, which has hosted a free discussion forum on all elements of fundraising for the past eight years, can confirm that online forums often experience periods of low activity.
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The bulletin board currently welcomes discussions on general fundraising from government, the four government departments currently featured on the site, and specific grant schemes such as the Parenting Fund and Local Network Fund. This area has had the least activity, with five of the seven grant schemes listed having no messages at all.
The bulletin board system allows users to search discussions and to request an e-mail alert each time a new message is posted to a thread of interest to them.
However, it is a very bare bones system. It doesn’t for example indicate in any of the message lists the date of each post. Nor does the e-mail alert of new messages indicate which message or messages was new: you have to search through the whole site and try to remember which of the messages you’d read before. The lack of dates makes this an even more difficult task. “There have been new postings on the topics to which you have subscribed” reads the e-mail alert: given we’ve subscribed to every discussion forum, that is not too helpful.
Later this month the site will publish a directory of its registered users. The Directory fo Social Change, which manages the site with funding from the Home Office Active Communities Directorate, says that this will “serve as a comprehensive directory of voluntary and community organisations and a useful networking tool for groups seeking funding.”
Oddly, the DSC is still reporting how many “hits” that the site is receiving. Counting hits is of course a discredited method of measuring a Web site’s popularity or user numbers. For those of you interested in how many times the site’s graphic logo, javascripts and CSS files, together with its other pages have been requested, whether by humans or Google’s bots, then the figure is 2.8m hits since the site’s first stage went live in September 2003.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.