UK Fundraising Forum reaches 1,000th registered user
Howard Lake | 16 September 2004 | News
UK Fundraising Forum, the free discussion forum for fundraisers, now has 1,000 registered users.
The Forum, which has been running since 1996, is designed to help fundraisers share expertise and experience and to help them avoid reinventing the wheel. Each message posted is archived in the Forum in its various topic categories, thus creating an unrivalled collection of freely-given advice and expertise from a wide variety of fundraisers and professional advisers.
The Forum continues to grow, and now has over 1,000 registered users. Users need to register on the Forum if they wish to post a message or sign up for e-mail alerts of new messages of interest to them.
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Of course, there is no need to register in order to search and read the Forum’s archive of messages. So, the Forum attracts and is used by many more than its 1,000 registered users.
The Forum is arguably one of the more successful online forums for UK voluntary sector staff, apart from being the first such resource in Europe for professional fundraisers. A quick glance at other related forums shows either a limited number of registered users or very infrequent use.
For example:
- The Company Solutions Forum has attracted 27 messages in the nine months since it launched in November 2003.
- Governmentfunding.org.uk has over 10,000 registered users interested in funding from government departments, but has attracted just 105 messages from this audience since it launched in July 2004. Nearly half of these were contributed in a two-hour question and answer session just after it launched.
- Looking at the membership of discussion forums hosted on the groups.yahoo.com site, we find that, as of today, charitywebforum has 342 members, corporate_fundraising has 301, prospect-research-uk has 210, statutory fundraising has 127, trust_fundraising has 597, and volresource has 86. For most of these, those figures are a maximum number of recipients because, unlike the UK Fundraising Forum, they do not allow unregistered or non-members to view and explore the archive.
If you haven’t yet explored the UK Fundraising Forum, try searching it now to see if your current fundraising problem has been discussed or answered already.
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.