Join me by Twittering from the International Fundraising Congress
Howard Lake | 8 August 2008 | Blogs
I’ll be going to the International Fundraising Congress in Holland this year in October, one of the very best fundraising conferences around the world.
I’m planning to share information and lessons from the Congress as widely as possible using social media, effectively acting as a ‘social reporter‘, to borrow David Wilcox’s term.
Old hands on this site might remember I offered a daily update on the 1997 IFC via the FundUK email list (now the UK Fundraising Forum). That was certainly a first for a fundraising conference, in the days before blogging tools and social media.
This time around though I hope that others will want to share their experiences from the Congress too using these tools. Delegates and speakers will, I hope, use blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the like to spread the lessons they’ve learned and thereby multiply the impact of the event. I’ll be trying to facilitate this and aggregate all this useful content.
The news flow will be for delegates at the event but also for non-delegates. Perhaps we can even use some of these tools to enable non-delegates to interact with delegates and speakers: maybe I’ll be able to feed questions from non-delegates live to speakers during sessions and then share the speakers’ answers.
So, lots of exciting opportunities.
To kickstart it all, I’ve set up a hashtag of ‘ifc08‘ on Twitter to enable posts about and from the conference to be linked together. If you use Twitter and want to discuss the conference or plan to post your own updates from the event, please type in #ifc08 in your tweets.
If you aren’t going to the event, you can still follow posts about it at
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ifc08
You can stay up to date with this by subscribing to the RSS feed for this search:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23ifc08
You can see that we’ve already got underway. I’m hoping that Steve Bridger and Beth Kanter, both of them experienced users of social media, will be just some of the people to use these tools in sharing their experiences from the event.
If you do join us in this initiative, why not introduce yourself via Twitter, remembering to include the #ifc08 tag?
This hashtag might go quiet from now on, as the Congress is still two months away.
But I hope as the event gets closer you’ll get to see some good examples of collaborative reporting from this major event for fundraisers.
Tweets by howardlake
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.