# Tweets from the Institute of Fundraising Convention

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/07/10/tweets-institute-fundraising-convention/
- Published: 2008-07-10T21:23:53+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**If you wanted to keep up to the minute with news from the Institute of Fundraising’s
National Convention in London earlier this week you could have done so by following
tweets.**

Tweets – nothing to do with hard little chocolate sweets from the 1970s – are posts
on the Twitter.com microblogging network. They were published both by me (follow
me on Twitter at [www.twitter.com/howardlake](http://www.twitter.com/howardlake))
and [Jonathan Waddingham](http://www.twitter.com/jon_bedford) who was running the
JustGiving exhibition stand at the event. [Rachel Beer had hoped to tweet from the Convention too](http://thecharityplace.typepad.com/the_charity_place/2008/07/is-this-the-tipping-point-for-uk-charities-adoption-of-social-media--i-had-planned-to-attend-and-tweet-from-this-year.html)
but had to stay in the office.

You can see the [flow of reports, thoughts and reactions](http://summize.com/search?q=iof08)
and here is an example of one of my tweets which summed up in less than 140 characters
two of the presentations in Tuesday’s ‘Focus on…’ series.

## Advertisement

> [#iof08](https://twitter.com/hashtag/iof08?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) two secrets
> of successful fundraisers (Focus on… session) – flirting (professionally) and 
> KISS (keep it simple stupid).
> — Howard Lake (@howardlake) [July 8, 2008](https://twitter.com/howardlake/status/852864103?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Waddingham helped aggregate our tweets by using a hashtag of **#iof08** to categorise
all posts about or from the event.

[Twitter](http://www.twitter.com) is one of the lesser used Web 2.0 tools in terms
of UK charities. A quick search for terms such as ‘fundraising’ and ‘charity’ yield
very few results on Twitter.

So, part of my intention of covering the Convention using Twitter was to demonstrate
just one way in which it could be used – reporting on an event, sharing the speakers’
expertise with a wider audience, and engaging in discussions with other people at
the event or Twittering from afar. And we did build a small network of interested
followers very quickly.

Is this the first time that Twitter has been used to report on a fundraising conference
or training session in the UK? Possibly.

Is it popular, understood, or used by many other people? No. But you heard it here
first, even if there were only two of us Twittering from amongst the 2,400 delegates.

 * **[More musings on Twitter and charities](https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/10/24/more-musings-twitter/)(
   24 October 2008)**