Third Sector website claims 'first online daily news service'
Howard Lake | 4 April 2007 | News
This week’s Third Sector magazine’s lead front page story reports that its redesigned website offers “the UK’s first daily news service about charities and the voluntary sector.” Unfortunately, the claim is about 10 years too late: UK Fundraising started publishing at least daily updates to its news and content back in May 1997.
UK Fundraising, published since November 1994, switched to daily updates when its founder Howard Lake began operating it full-time in May 1997 after leaving Amnesty International UK.
Looking back at the archives, it was not until September/October 1997 that the site started publishing at least one news item every day, but from May that year several items such training events, jobs, key dates, books, and new suppliers, as well as news items, were being added each day.
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If it is a daily email update that Third Sector refers to, then UK Fundraising was running one back in 2002 together with a daily jobs and training events email alert.
While Third Sector certainly has a broader focus than this site, UK Fundraising has always adopted a catholic approach to fundraising. So our daily news updates for the last 10 years have covered management, recruitment, law, technology, communications, governance, and finance – many of the areas (or channels) covered by Third Sector.
Having published online for so long we’ve seen (and debunked) a number of claims to have achieved an online first, but we’ll have this title back for ourselves please.
Response from Stephen Cook, editor, Third Sector
“Fundraising.co.uk has done a great job over the years, pioneering online news and other services to the fundraising community. What we wanted to emphasise is that our new site is the first to provide a comprehensive news service covering all the disciplines in the voluntary sector, from fundraising to finance to governance to volunteering.”
12 April 2007
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.