10 top charity new media resources
Howard Lake | 28 September 2005 | News
Following a question from the audience at yesterday’s New Media Fundraising conference, panel member and charity new media expert Sarah Hughes of Charity21 has drawn up a list of her top 10 resources for news and advice on charities’ use of new media. She is sharing her list with UK Fundraising.
Whilst there are potentially hundreds of useful resources out there, here are the ones I dip into regularly and consider the best for getting your armament of help, knowledge and those all important facts and statistics together.
Places to learn, post and interact:
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1. UK Fundraising – www.fundraising.co.uk – go here for all the latest and archive news about fundraising, join the newsletter, and watch for examples from others of what and what not to do with new media.
2. Join charitywebforum – groups.yahoo.com/group/charitywebforum – so you can ask questions and share information with a peer community of charity website managers and New Media professionals.
3. To get started with IT related questions, use It for Charities – www.itforcharities.co.uk/ – it’s a bit of who’s who or what’s what directory with contact information too. What a time saver!
For facts and figures for your presentations and reports, and to sway the skeptics, go to the next 3:
4. nfpSynergy – www.nfpsynergy.net – Virtual Promise is the sector’s only annual survey into charities use of online channels to market. It is now entering its 5th year. Read this important material and more importantly, get people debating it. I’d like to get the sector debating it too.
5. The Office of National Statistics – www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=8 – it’s official, over half of households access the Internet. Business statistics too.
6. The Mobile Data Association – www.mda-mobiledata.org – is a not for profit global association. 78% of the UK population own a mobile phone and across all income brackets. 43% of adults use text messaging.
If you have some money to spend, the best commercial source I use is:
7. E-consultancy – www.e-consultancy.com. It’s good enough for its news, discussion boards and some free reports, but a paid subscription buys you unlimited access to all their trend analysis and best practice guides. Well worth it at £99 + VAT. Or in some cases you can pay per view.
For highly professional, totally free and totally vital media communications help:
8. Media Trust – http://www.mediatrust.org – two ‘don’t miss it’ free services are its media matching database and Communitynewswire, a partnership with the Home Office and the Press Association where 20 charity news stories a day will go out to the nation’s.
And finally, two community-driven resources I must mention because only we, the users, can make them what we really need them to be. And because the people trying to put these things together really are trying to do something amazing, difficult and potentially invaluable:
9. Citra – www.citra.org -white papers, resources, events and opinions (yours) on technology and related issues
10. Capaciteria – www.capaciteria.org – the only global peer-rated resource service I know of on literally every subject non profit organisations need to know about. Of course, there’s plenty on the Internet and fundraising. Go there to rate existing links and resources, or to add your own.
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.