Institute of Fundraising launches its first online discussion forum
Howard Lake | 2 February 2005 | News
The Institute of Fundraising has introduced its first interactive facility on its website in the form of a professional development forum, part of its Careerbank initiative.
The forum is designed for all fundraisers whether or not they are currently working toward the Certificate in Fundraising Management.
The Institute says that the forum has been created for fundraisers to “seek peer advice, discuss your development opportunities, or simply ask a question”. Specifically, the forum “should be used for anything that aids your professional development”. In this way, the Institute indicates that the Forum is not designed to duplicate the work of other existing forums, such as the various Yahoo!-based email forums, and UK Fundraising’s Forum, which has been running for nine years. The Institute’s forum “should not be used to discuss general fundraising e.g. fundraising techniques or to seek advice on how to fundraise”. The Institute adds: “if you are looking for this sort of discussion please visit another Forum.”
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The Institute has selected the a Perl/CGI script-based DCForum from DCScripts to handle the Forum.
The forums are moderated, so messages do not appear immediately they are posted. Only registered users can post messages, although it is possible to explore the forum without needing to register. Registered users can choose to receive email alerts when new messages in forums of interest to them are posted.
Although the system allows you to edit a message you have posted for up to 60 minutes, if the moderator takes longer than an hour to approve your message, this facility becomes unavailable.
The figure for page views for each item is helpful, but, unlike other forums such as the UK Fundraising Forum, it can be boosted simply by refreshing the page.
The ‘who is online’ feature can also be a handy indicator about how popular a forum is. Currently though it is set to count any visitor in the past 60 minutes as “online” or at the site, which is an optimistic expectation for the length of a visit. The UK Fundraising Forum, for example, counts only those who have been active on the site in the past 20 minutes as “online”. Even with that shorter period, we have still managed to reach a best-ever figure of 224 visitors online concurrently.
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.