Curation: gathering and sharing the best web content about your charity
Howard Lake | 7 June 2011 | Blogs
You and your colleagues write some good compelling material for your website and Facebook page. You probably get alerts to new content or comments about your charity on the web and other social media sites. You know what is going on and what people are saying about you, but do your staff, supporters and the wider world?
Chances are, they will know only a little of what people, bloggers, twitterers and journalists are saying about you, or the videos, photos, links and comments they are sharing about you.
Which is where the need for ‘curation’ comes in. Curating, like the skill involved in putting together an art exhibition, is the skill of finding, gathering, selecting and presenting content. You do it already on a daily basis – choosing which emails to read, which newspaper to buy, which videos to share with friends on Facebook, which web pages to bookmark.
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But is your charity as a whole curating the fabulous content about it that exists on the web? And I’m sure you’ll agree that often it’s other people who write about you better than you could, especially when it is a supporter, a service user or a beneficiary. Indeed, being able to highlight these independent voices can be more effective, convincing and engaging than your best in-house written appeal or campaign.
Which is why I’m running a new training course – to help charities make the most of curating digital content from across the web and social media sites, pulling it all together for greater impact.
You could say I’ve been ‘curating’ UK Fundraising for the past 17 years, gathering, filtering, presenting information from a wide range of voices, and adding my own take. Indeed, my interest in this element of information management goes back to my MSc in Information Science in the early 1990s.
So, if you think your charity could benefit from understanding and applying digital curation, come along to the course. It will run first in London in September, but then I’ll take it to other towns around the UK.
I can also run it in-house to train your staff and volunteers if you wish.
Details about the course are [no longer available].
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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.