MS Research has launched a Fan Page on Facebook in the non-profit category. Choose the category carefully: first click on institution then non-profit. Charities in the UK cannot yet use the Causes application for secure donations but there is always a way around this and I am very happy to share this with you.

Once the moment of creating the page is done with you may start adding some useful apps. Creating the page took longer as the webmaster email of the charity which is redirected to my own was not accepted. Did Facebook find out I was disguising myself? I settled this by using our spare email at Google as I always think the job of webmaster is not mine for life. So webbie got accepted in the end. Rabbit was made admin with no hesitation.

Some tabs at the top of the wall page were not so useful so they could be placed in the back (the >> and + tabs). Click on Edit page, settings need to be edited first, decide if you want the whole world to know or just the UK…Wall settings decide if you want post by fans as well as the charity. Set where the post will go if the fan and others cannot post on the wall. Boxes is quite good for that.

Now the Page has some donation buttons for Justgiving and CAF on the right. These have been added using the Static FBML is what I used I recommend getting Learn FBML visiting Learn FBML might help use Static FBML. Once anything is created using Static FBML it will be visible in Boxes. From there you can make it go on the Wall on the left. So the size of the button is important. The wider buttons will stay in Boxes. Update the Fans about your new additions. I did it like this because the Justgiving apps on Facebook is not yet workin on Fan Pages. That was very frustrating.

 A button code as the CAF one will not show at all without placing the code in <div></div> , some useful html coding works in FBML so I used <b> and <i> to stress what I was saying. I think that colour can be added using <span></span> so whatch it! Creativity can be released. At the bottom of the Edit Page the is the More Applications facility, click on the right and browse for more applications: other than Static FLML and Learn FBML I think I added Notes and the blessed Drop.io which is brilliant and can be used for uploading pdf documents to share with your fans. Reviews and Discussions are also useful but can be coming into action later. Extended Info is very good as the info tab is limited. There is Poll too So there is always a reason to update your existing fans and welcome the new ones. On the right of the Edit page you can find some helping information, the examples are not always useful for the UK. This is why I thought of helping you with this. Then I tweet about it too, follow me?

The website of the charity has a new layout, a new design and some new volunteers. The need for help is as poignant as ever. Reports of dramatic falls in charitable giving are overblown; volunteering should not be depleted as time and commitment are two things that are needed. That is also giving. Volunteers are always needed for collections, information days and there are two posts in particular that are vacant: Development Officer, Southern Region and Training Officer.

We have found a Development Officer for the Northern region. She is going to be extremely busy with facilitating Phil and Ian’s Coast to Coast Fundraising. Have you got what it takes to help us with something like this? That is  run (on average) 7 marathons in 7 days!!! If not, you could become a Development Officer for the Southern Region. It needs the same level of commitment. Please contact us or use this form.

So, MS Researh has made it easy for single or regular donations to be made on the Charity Aid Foundation (CAF) and with Justgiving the possibilties are endless to donate or create some pages for fundraising all over the UK and Northern Ireland.

The website is now on an easy to maintain  Content Management System (CMS). The webmaster has not retired! She still needs to train the researchers to publish some more of their news. MS Researh charity decided to upgrade to CMS as it was not wise to expect one volunteer only to know how to update and publish.

As pointed out in an email from Dan Macquillan of Internet Artizans, Amnesty International’s website is now running on the open source platforms of Drupal and CiviCRM.

I’ll add it to the CharityBlog link page of open source use by voluntary groups, but it’s getting such a common occurrence now that a) it would be difficult to keep track of them all and b) it’s no longer hard to find and learn from such examples.

An American volunteering website made Time Magazine’s Top 10 list (of websites, that is) for 2007. Link to Volunteer Match.

I saw some turn of year mentions of UK volunteer opportunities, but don’t think any sites got quite that level of recognition over here. Can anyone prove me wrong?

(Time top 10 courtesy of ephilanthropy.org)

It’s not just government agencies which manage to lose important data.

Kablenet reports that a laptop containing client information has been stolen from the car of an employee of Citizens Advice in Northern Ireland, with up to 60,000 client records. However, the data is protected by three levels of security, including a high level of encryption.

Please note that the kablenet site was too busy when we went to double check the link (which can disappear after a few weeks).

Charities and other voluntary organisations are to get the chance to use Ordnance Survey maps in web applications for non-commercial purposes. Technology Guardian reports:

Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace product is a “slippy map” interface, a piece of software that allows users to place any kind of information with a geographic reference over a map displayed on the web. Maps available through the service range from the 1:1m outline of Great Britain, up to street level (1:10,000). “It provides you with all the necessary functionality to interact with a map such as panning, zooming and adding markers and polygons,” the agency says. Users will need no special knowledge of geographic information system software.

It is currently at ‘closed alpha test’ stage but should open up early 2008. OS OpenSpace.

And while we’re on human rights, a posting on judging Best Use of the Social Web by a Nonprofit comes up with some innovative uses in the field - the use of Twitter by activists to let people know whether they’ve been arrested or disappeared and “the courageous use of YouTube by award winning blogger Wael Abbas , whose videos captured the torture of victims at the hands of police”.

From internet.artizans , via Nick Booth.

Amnesty International has a “new, completely re-architected, W3C Web Content Accessibility-compliant, data protection law and privacy legislation-compliant, multi-lingual and totally open source Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco-based website”. That’s according to Important Projects consultancy, who had something to do with it.

Not everyone will like the bright yellow backing to headlines, but then that’s part of the brand image.

It can be fun trying to keep a track of thinking around online communities and effective ways of using the web, and then trying to work out how that relates to the voluntary sector. For instance:

On Gerry McGovern’s blog, which emphasises focusing on the customer not the organisation, Thinking Web, not website “If your product or service is being discussed in the blogosphere, you must be there, listening and contributing. Is it more important to publish your content on your website or on the websites most of your customers frequent? If your organization has particular words for describing a service, and those are not the words your customers search with, you must change your words.

“On the Web, we need to think beyond the organization. What is success? Is it that having a website? Or is it getting people to act in a certain way? It is the results of what you organize that matters, not the organization you created or where you created it.”

So does that mean that trying to create your own online communities, and then measuring activity etc, isn’t important? My short answer, as often, would be “it depends” (long answer on application and a small fee). For another aspect, try Ed Mitchell’s blog entry, Community ROI Report, where he says “Many of us are wrestling with emergent community metrics and their meaning in this time of increasingly distributed community activity.”

How do you get statistics simple enough to collect and report reliably across sites which aren’t yours? But then Facebook’s new Pages facility has a built-in ‘Insight’ section, giving some feedback on views and visitors.

October 15th is ‘Blog Action Day‘, aiming “to get everyone talking towards a better future”, posting on the environment. Well, one day of talking isn’t going to crack the range of environmental issues we face but our blogpool, bringing together feeds from a variety of charity blogs , does feature a fair few with a slant in that direction and is around for more than a day.

In passing, increasingly Facebook has a range of issue groups with a presence on the social network. Whether it is any easier to keep up with development in areas you are interested in is dubious, but I guess having them in one spot could help.