Curating your charity’s reputation with Storify
Howard Lake | 12 May 2011 | Blogs
‘Curating’ web content is one of the web phrases du jour. It’s an area that interests me because it reminds me of much that I learned from my Masters in Information Science in the early 1990s, out of which grew UK Fundraising.
One of the trickier but fascinating tasks I had to undertake was to create and write a faceted classification of the Cambodian peace process.
Can you guess that I like information management, and probably don’t get invited to as many parties as you do?
Curating might once have had a rather fusty image, but it’s a popular notion now, viewed as a way of helping people navigate the onslaught of information. There are plenty of tech startups operating in this area, some of whom have attracted considerable funding.
Advertisement
Curating itself is a skill that we all carry out every day. We assess information, discard much, save some and classify it – whether on a PC or on bookshelves or on your desk. It’s an essential skill given the volume of content we all have to handle.
I do it all the time of course, as an online publisher. I find and assess information every day, some of which gets shared on UK Fundraising, some on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Much of that information I classify in some way, either in subject categories or with keyword tags.
I believe charities should focus on their curating skills to help them make the most of the swirl of content available. They can use this skill and the tools available to demonstrate their expertise on a particular issue, and to gather the best of relevant content from others, and to present it in one compelling and easy to use digest, or series of digests.
Here’s an example I’ve just put together on Storify.com. It’s a collection of positive feedback on UK Fundraising and our work.
I’ve used just tweets, but I could have added videos, web links, photos and other content.
Can you create a similar collection of feedback on the good work that you do? You might or your colleagues might spot these kind words about you, but why not curate them, gather them and display them for others to see just how much people value what you do?
- Curation: gathering and sharing the best web content about your charity (7 June 2011)
- Age UK curate London Marathon fundraising excitement with Storify (24 April 2012)
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.