How to join in online with the International Fundraising Congress
Howard Lake | 19 October 2010 | Blogs
While there are over 900 fundraisers travelling to the 30th International Fundraising Congress in Holland, there are plenty more who aren’t going or can’t go.
But they and you can join in for free, thanks to the use of a range of social media tools by some of the delegates and presenters.By sharing tips, ideas, comments, links and other information gleaned from the event, they can help even more fundraisers around the world derive some benefit from this event.
Is it as good as being there? No, of course not. But it’s the next best thing on a zero training budget. And the distinction between delegates present at the Congress and those tweeting about it from afar is less clear than you’d imagine: last year, tweeting from the UK, I was offered several beers in the Congress bar by people who thought I was there in person!
So, where can you follow what’s going on? Here is a quick toolkit to get you started. I’ll be featuring as much as I can here on UK Fundraising, gathering links and content contributed by others as well as my own content.
Other activity will no doubt take place on:
* Twitter: IFC’s account, and all tweets mentioning 30thIFC
* YouTube: IFC’s channel, and our channel
* Flickr: my photos, the International Fundraising Congress group, and anything tagged 30thIFC.
* Facebook: IFC page
* Foursquare
* Slideshare: not much to show yet for a search on Resource Alliance but no doubt that’ll change over the next few days.
* LinkedIn: IFC’s group
* a whole range of blogs, and Tumblr and Posterous accounts
Have I missed any?
As you can see, there are a lot of places to follow. I’ll do my best to aggregate and curate the streams of information and discussions that I find and pull them into a single place on UK Fundraising.
What should you do on these sites?
* Join in. Enjoy the material, insight and professional chat with your peers from around the world.
* Whether you are contributing from the event or from afar, try and include the hashtag of code #30thIFC in your message e.g. on Twitter, or as a tag or keyword when you are classifying or tagging your contribution.
That way lots of us can find them more easily.
* You could also try adding a hashtag for the session number of the presentation you are commenting about e.g. #30thIFC #14
* Ask questions!
* Comment on what you see and hear.
* Ask for clarification.
* Gather, curate and then show off information you’ve gathered, and tell everyone so we can enjoy and use it.
For example, why not create a Twitter list of all those people using Twitter to talk about the Congress? Then other fundraisers can, in one click, start following all of them.
* Rate, ‘like’ or make some of the contributions a ‘favourite’.
* If you’re a delegate at the Congress, please help ensure that a wide range of sessions are reported on and shared. Not surprisingly, it tends to be the digital sessions that enjoy the lion’s share of coverage.
And if you like this kind of curating of an event, bear in mind that you can hire me to do this for your event or conference.
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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.