UK Fundraising celebrates 14th anniversary
Howard Lake | 1 December 2008 | Blogs
UK Fundraising celebrated its 14th birthday yesterday: it has been publishing online since 1994.
So, once again, it is time to say thank you to the many people who make this site the popular and useful resource it is to so many fundraisers.
Thank you to our contributors, especially Penny Stephens, Paul Artherton, and Craig Methven.
Thank you to our growing cadre of bloggers who bring such wide experience, practical ideas and a decent dash of humour to the site.
Thank you to everyone else who chips in their thoughts and comments on the forum and throughout the site, now that virtually every page offers a comment facility.
Thank you to Gary, Courteney, Dan and Paul who successfully convince a wide range of fundraising companies and agencies that this site offers good value, effective advertising. And thank you to all those who advertise on this site.
Achievements in the past year
The past year saw the site take a major leap forward with a complete overhaul and move to Drupal, an open source content management system that has truly turned this site into the community for fundraisers that we have always seen it as. Blogs, comments, reviews, ratings – the site is far more than the daily news service that draws most people to it.
It means we now publish most of our content as RSS feeds as well, making it easier for readers to keep up to date with the content that interests them.
We now aggregate content from over 40 of the other best sites for fundraising information, confirming UK Fundraising’s status as collaborative, up-to-date, and one of the leading sources of fundraising information online .
We’ve started to welcome ‘citizen journalists’ to the site – people who would like to write the occasional news story for the site.
And we have much more planned of course. We really haven’t opened up the social networking functions of the site to any large degree, but that will come.
Use of social media
On that subject, we’ve continued to try out and learn from the growing number of social media tools available. We have presences on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, delicious, and several other places, and have enjoyed learning from and, most importantly, listening to the friendly advice shared there.
As you will have noticed, the new site enables us to use much larger graphics and video. Indeed, we’ve started offering video reports from events and video interviews with key players. Our video coverage at this year’s International Fundraising Congress seemed to go down very well.
Recession
We, like many of you, have experienced the downturn. Indeed, we spotted the falling off of advertising revenue, currently the site’s prime source of income, start right at the beginning of the year. But we only operate online and have always been a lean organisation so we’re confident that we’ll be around for some time yet.
Some things don’t change
While we’ve made some major changes and improvements to the site in the past year, some things haven’t changed over the past 14 years. We are still independent, we’ve never taken a penny in grants from anywhere, and we welcome good content from anyone.
Even though the site’s number of registered users continues to grow (30-50 new registrations a week at present), and the site remains first or second in search results for ‘fundraising’ on Google.com (and on other major search engines), we know our limitations and are conscious of our profiile.
In particular, we don’t ever claim to represent fundraisers and the fundraising industry or anyone but ourselves. Although our audience is professional fundraisers, we know that our site is open to the general public, the media and others, but think that this transparency is actually a good thing for our sector.
Our environmental footprint is still miniscule. This year I took one return flight to Holland on business for the website (the train fare was three times more expensive), and there is no company car: all travel is on public transport, and that probably applies to our contributors too. In 14 years the company has probably accounted for under 10 return flights in the UK or Europe.
Where’s the collaboration?
The site remains resolutely open to collaboration. If there is one negative side to this year, it is my disappointment that there is not more collaboration in the online fundraising environment, in particular the infrastructure element of the sector.
I still read about more new online forums for fundraisers, new separate websites for fundraisers, some costing a good deal of money. It’s the self-interested silo mentality replicating to a large degree what is already there.
I’m not suggesting that UK Fundraising should or could be the exclusive home for all fundraising content – the Web 2.0 ethos means that’s neither desirable nor possible. But genuine collaboration offers or enquiries are pretty much non-existent from where I sit. Who is thinking of ‘mashups’ (clever data integration from two or more sources) that make fundraisers’ lives easier? Who is thinking about how to use the existing fundraising sector building blocks better or in a different way?
I’ve got some ideas, some of which you’ll see on UK Fundraising next year. If we come across any others, even if they don’t involve UK Fundraising, rest assured that we’ll feature news of them on UK Fundraising.
So, onwards into our fifteenth year of serving fundraisers and the fundraising industry.
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.