Tweets from the Institute of Fundraising Convention
Howard Lake | 10 July 2008 | Blogs
If you wanted to keep up to the minute with news from the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention in London earlier this week you could have done so by following tweets.
Tweets – nothing to do with hard little chocolate sweets from the 1970s – are posts on the Twitter.com microblogging network. They were published both by me (follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/howardlake) and Jonathan Waddingham who was running the Justgiving exhibition stand at the event. Rachel Beer had hoped to tweet from the Convention too but had to stay in the office.
You can see the flow of reports, thoughts and reactions and here is an example of one of my tweets which summed up in less than 140 characters two of the presentations in Tuesday’s ‘Focus on…’ series.
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Waddingham helped aggregate our tweets by using a hashtag of #iof08 to categorise all posts about or from the event.
Twitter is one of the lesser used Web 2.0 tools in terms of UK charities. A quick search for terms such as ‘fundraising’ and ‘charity’ yield very few results on Twitter.
So, part of my intention of covering the Convention using Twitter was to demonstrate just one way in which it could be used – reporting on an event, sharing the speakers’ expertise with a wider audience, and engaging in discussions with other people at the event or Twittering from afar. And we did build a small network of interested followers very quickly.
Is this the first time that Twitter has been used to report on a fundraising conference or training session in the UK? Possibly.
Is it popular, understood, or used by many other people? No. But you heard it here first, even if there were only two of us Twittering from amongst the 2,400 delegates.
- More musings on Twitter and charities (24 October 2008)
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.