An American collaboration site (wiki) on PR matters has established a section on ‘Non-Profit Blogging, Podcasting and Social Media’. I’ll try to keep an eye on any interesting developments relevant outside the States, but I do have to agree with them that “for now, it is easier to find sites writing ‘about’ nonprofit activities than actual blogs ‘by’ nonprofit organizations.”

NewPR Wiki - NonProfitBlogs.HomePage

[tags]nonprofit blogs, charity blogs[/tags]

An item on Computer Weekly says:

A disparate group of 50 non-profit US organisations have defeated AOL in its plan to start charging them for sending out bulk e-mail. …which could cripple their fundraising efforts. The group includes Oxfam America, Gun Owners of America, Friends of the Earth, and the AFL-CIO trade union confederation.

AOL has now said that non-profit organisations will be exempt from the charges.

Link to AOL backs down to non-profit bodies over e-mail levy.

Any regular readers may have noticed the dance around domain names for this blog over the last couple of months. There are reasons behind this madness, one of them being to clear the decks at voluntarynews.org(.uk) so it could be a place to develop our news pages further.

CharityBlog visitors are the first to learn that we are almost there - a couple of facilities we haven’t managed to set up quite how we’d like yet but you can get an idea here. (Basically using the same base as this blog but with extra bells and whistles.)

Reactions please!

Here’s our most recent stab at compiling an introduction to the sector on VolResource (and therefore to the website). We would welcome comments on our thoughts and if anyone has a ‘magic starter’ to taking responsibility in a voluntary organisation:

Find what you want and act on it

If approached in the wrong way the large amount of material on this site could make things worse.

There is an awful lot involved in running a successful organisation or project, whatever its size or complexity. It can be a daunting prospect. You can’t do everything at once, and trying to do too much can end up with nothing done well, and probably much having to be redone (by you or someone else after you’ve burnt out!).

Work out what is important for your particular circumstances. It can help to talk things through with someone from outside, whether from an official support body or not, as an ‘uninvolved’ view may well spot something you have taken for granted, and just by having to communicate what you are trying to do often clarifies the issues.

Don’t forget about the other issues - perhaps people with a particular interest can be found to help with them or come up with a timetable to work through them. Just don’t lose the focus.

CharityBlog has been ‘tagged’ by Beth Kanter in connection with a ‘meme’ on What are the five resources that you would recommend to anybody working in an NGO who wanted to know about information management and technology but didn’t know where to start.

VolResource is of course the real resource, which has also sorts of relevant stuff, but here’s my five (from England really, not even UK-centric)

• Lasa Knowledgebase
• CITRA
• ICT Consortium
• UK Riders discussion list
• Charity Web Managers - Yahoo group

As to 5 people to pass this meme on to, I think I’ll do that off-blog - bound to annoy somebody otherwise!

Technorati Tags: ngomeme

Written for an American audience and about databases for fundraising, but most of it still makes sense for membership/contact databases: ‘Ten Common Mistakes in Selecting Donor Databases (And How to Avoid Them)’.

Article on Idealware, highlighted on NetSquared blog.

From time to time there’s a highly relevant posting on the Neighbourhoods blog from Kevin Harris. A new one is ‘The problem of scale: neighbourhoods and participation’ where he discusses the relevance of a presentation by Anthony Kelly of Oxfam Australia:

“too much of our UK community sector is getting sucked into the delivery service paradigm; and that we get into confusions because we look to establish participation at the same scale as service delivery. We somehow assume that the same values, terms of engagement and democratic style should apply.”

More here.