UK Fundraising is 15 years old today
Howard Lake | 30 November 2009 | Blogs
UK Fundraising is 15 years old today! I wrote and uploaded the first HTML page – yes, the site started as a single page – on 30 November 1994.
It was the world’s first web resource specifically for professional charity fundraisers. It originally sat on a Sun Solaris server at City University, London, where I was researching electronic sources of fundraising information for a MSc in Information Science. At that time I was working as a fundraiser for Amnesty International UK.
So, imagine a time before Google and Amazon. When I was still searching gopher and WAIS for fundraising resources and examples.
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You must remember this. UK Fundraising’s first logo, from 1994
Indeed, I remember working out that UK Fundraising was one of the first 3,000 websites (based on unique URL) ever created – and that included the universities around the world etc that were part of the web’s backbone. No, can’t quite find the link to prove that.
Oh my. Things have changed. The site is a business, has 28,000+ registered users, and its users are sharing their own expertise, ideas and advice on it in ever greater numbers. That was something I’d hoped for from the beginning, hence the early introduction of a forum, originally an email list and now web-based.
So, while many users see it as a news site, I see it equally as a professional community. That latter word has become somewhat overused in the social media age, but I do hope you’ll agree that it has long been part of UK Fundraising’s appeal.
Needless to say, I’ve got lots more planned. As well as an improved version with a redesign, it’s about time I looked at a mobile version, made it easier for more fundraisers to share and contribute their advice, ideas and news, and made it easier to keep up to date with.
But what would you like to see the site do? How can it help you become even more effective in your fundraising?
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.