Archive for January, 2008

The big picture - a site with great participation potential

I don’t usually write about my favourite websites, or websites that I think can really create ownership and participation with a big audience, but just yesterday a new website was launched that really deserves a mention.

The Big Picture is a project to create the biggest photo album in the West Midlands. Everyone can add their favourite pictures, with the innovation being the ease in which people can participate, sharing their photos and tell the stories behind them.

The project is being run by Arts Council England (West Midlands), supported by the BBC and will run until June 2008. Over the next six months, the project will aim to collect more than 95,000 individual images, which will be then used to create a giant, world record-breaking, photomontage of peoples stories and images of their life and locality.

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The basics of data portability

Data portability has been big news in the web tech world in recent weeks. If you want to understand more, there’s a great new article and easy to understand video explaining the basics on ReadWriteWeb showing DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix by Smashcut Media.

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Using social media to meet others before an event

Meeting people for the first time at events, conferences and job interviews for example can be tricky for some.
Chris Brogan has written a useful article with lots of helpful suggestions on how you can use social media to meet people.

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Using images in fundraising

Christine Martell of VisualSpeak has a wonderful screencast about how images were used in Beth Kanters online fundraising campaign. Some good tips and advice on how to use images, plus also a really great example of how screencasting can be used to present a subject.

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Getting the most from social media for nonprofits: what would you recommend?

The forthcoming Circuit Rider conference for ICT support and development workers here in the UK is being held at the end of February (see the conference page at Lasa’s website for further details). I’ll be delivering a session on Web 2.0 and social media for the nonprofit sector, along with David Wilcox of Desigining for a Civil Society and Nick Booth from Podnosh. We aim to use some of these tools and techniques to enable Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog (based in America) to join us too in the session.

We’re currently exploring what we should include in the workshop, and this is where you can help shape our session with your ideas.
The aim of the session is to introduce and explore ideas that participants can then take back with them to use when supporting nonprofit organisations with their advice and support.
So far, we’ve begun to discuss membership, inclusiveness and participation, fundraising and the benefits of social media.

This is where you can help -

• What social media tools should we include to highlight how social media can benefit nonprofit organisations and why?
• Do you have any examples (especially UK ones!) of how use of social media has made dramatic difference to an organisation; enabling it to better deliver its work to benefit its users, beneficiaries or community?
• What ideas do you have to increase participation and sign up, for example, for an organisation who may consider using social media to reach out to potential new supporters for a campaign?

I’m particularly interested in hearing about not only how to increase the participation and involvement from the intended audience, but also, importantly by the organisation as a whole. I know that this area especially, is a challenge that lots of volunteers and staff face in organisations - how to get the sign up, and support from their colleagues.

I look forward to hearing your ideas and inspiration.
I will also be using my other social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Seesmic to ask the same questions.
Either leave a comment or you can contact me direct.

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Circuit Riders Conference: 28th and 29th February

If you provide direct ICT support and development to voluntary and community organisations, make sure you book your place for the ICT Hub 4th Annual Circuit Rider conference which is taking place at: BVSC in Digbeth, Birmingham on the 28th and 29th February 2008. To find out more and book your place see the conference page on Lasa’s website.

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Get the picture

Whilst discussing publicity and promotion with one of my new local groups who are just setting up earlier this week, they mentioned that they were thinking of using Flickr to put up the photos onto the internet they’ll take at an event planned for the summer. They thought it would be good to begin to create a bank of photo’s for their upcoming organisation to be able to use in their own future publicity as they have no office base as yet; as well as being a place where supporters and participants from their event could show others what they did on the day. The interested volunteer used Flickr at home for their own family photo’s to keep friends and family who lived far away up to date with their own adventures.

I was quite excited by this and said to them that it was great that they were exploring the use of social media for their organisation.

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Should your organisation use social networking sites?

A useful guide to help you work out whether social networking sites can add value and benefit the work of your organisation. See the full article to help you decide at Techsoup - Should your organisation use social networking sites?.

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Lessons Learned: Nonprofits and Social Media

Beth Kanter tagged me in a meme, asking the question “What if I could start all my social media and nonprofits work over from scratch? What would I do differently? What lessons have I learned that will stick with me for 2008?”

New Year is a great time to reflect on the past and begin to put things in order for the coming year ahead; so this is a timely request where I can look back over my learning during 2007 and begin to explore the future. (by the way, Happy New Year Readers!)

So, here is some of my learning:

• What can a social network do for you? Why do you join one network over another?

  On of the biggest things that I learnt this year about social networks is that they can potentially eat up lots of time. I’m on a wide range of networks and I have to gauge which will have the most benefit to me and the people that I want to connect with. Each network must have their own purpose and place.

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Common errors with web accessibility

Webcredible’s latest article on 10 common errors when implementing accessibility is a useful reminder for those making their websites accessible and inclusive to all.

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