It may not be news to some of you but I am pleased to tell you you that the CSE from Google works well and is easy to set up with no ads on Google for a charity. This existed previously and was changed without letting the user know. So I had the search for non-profit organizations still running with the old settings and wrong links to the site. I also had no way of changing anything! It had taken so long to Google to notice that they were offering this to US non-profit only. I was worried to change the search (what is not broken…) but the improvement is that you can design your own result page!

I am pleased to show this to you:

1. search for “rehabilitation” on MS Research search page (this is not what we have at the moment; the idea is still good to use 10/01/09)
2. see the results page.

I said it was simple to use but it took a while for the penny to drop as you need to write the url of the results page in the search page code.

Last week I have published a new design for the MS Research charity website. It is using a free template from D. Carter who gives away some of his designs on his own site or with others on the Open Source Design. I provide the work free and I have been a volunteer for many years. At the same time, things are changing at the MS Research and Resources Unit and a new volunteer is writing a newsletter which will give no doubt some details about the Project on Fatigue started last month…Then there will be another round of updates.

James Davis, who runs the FreeCharity hosting service, mainly around WordPress (which is also the software usd here), has produced a petitions plug-in. A demo should appear below.

This will enable collecting ’signatures’ by verifying the email address given (which can only be used once). Quite simple to set up. I’m just wondering how long it will be before spammers start hitting it - they seem to like filling in any online form they find.

More on the WordPress plug-in.

Update: Sample Petition trial now deactivated (took 3 weeks before spam began).

Thanks to a post on the Globalab blog, we’ve ended up with a number of links to sites which I’ve grouped under ‘Social Change 2.0′. That’s discussing using the web, social networking and other ‘Web 2.0′ type things to promote social change. See the Links page, right at the bottom.

And before I get round to writing this blog item, Gordon Brown makes ’social change’ a theme in his support for community and voluntary organisation campaigning, including to “encourage the use of multimedia for community and social action by creating the Awards for Social Technology”. More in this week’s VolResource newsletter, or perhaps view the (edited) Downing Street YouTube video of the PM’s speech.

Here’s one item I probably won’t try to include in the weekly email newsletter, as it would trigger too many spam alarms.

From this week’s Computing magazine: Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) has had to change its email arrangements so that genuine communications covering such topics as HIV and AIDS, Vietnamese currency (dong) and originating from its office at spam hotspot the island of Vanuatu can get through.

Charity fights against overzealous spam filters - 19 Jul 2007 - Computing.co.uk

I really ought to get out and do various stuff in the garden, now that the sun is back in Malvern, but while I’m digesting my lunch …..

The RSS (news feed) aggregator we’ve been using over on VoluntaryNews has improved a lot now that that site has been upgraded to latest software. So adding it here to ’stream’ latest items from charity news blogs and campaign sites seemed a good idea. Take a look at the Blog Pool section.

I’ve scraped around various link pages and bookmarks created over the last year to find appropriate feeds. Some are now dead (although the sites still exist), some, particularly on Blogspot, don’t want to work with the aggregator. We’d be pleased to have suggestions for others - we only poll feeds roughly daily to keep server load down at both ends.

You can of course use CharityBlog to create your own blog news, and this will generate an RSS feed which can be used elsewhere.

It’s good to see that the Institute of Fundraising has finally moved away from its old web site which completely ignored accessibility issues. Unfortunately its chosen back room engine, OneStop CMS, makes life a pain if your web browser is set to restrict cookies, continuously asking for a spurious username and password. If you cancel this often enough it WILL go away, but I’ve given in and allowed IoF to set cookies.

And a colleague comments: “It’s still a crap website requiring too many clicks, many of them not very intuitive.” While checking out the cookies issue, I managed to get some very funny layouts, but for me it doesn’t quite get the case study award for how to address accessibility without doing usability.

Development Trusts Association has the same CMS and issue, as surprisingly does the CMS supplier, www.cubik.co.uk.

I’m currently investigating using the open source Drupal for moving the main VolResource into the Web 2.0 world (yuk) so any horror stories on that front welcome sooner rather than later! Plus - a raft a of new third sector groups have adopted Drupal recently, but so far all seem to be hosting the sites in the States. Why?

Response received from IoF Web editor Frazer Orr:

thank you for taking the time to look at the Institute’s new website and posting your comments on Charity blog.

I’m very excited about the potential of the new site.

I know that the cookies thing can be a pain for users who don’t like them being dropped on their computer but the more we understand about how the website is used the better we can make it. This is an issue for more sites than just our own.

I am happy with using onestopcms. It’s a very powerful system and allows us to do a number of things which aren’t possible on other systems. It will be some time before we are getting the most out of it but there are plenty of exciting possibilities.

It does address the issue of accessibility very well which is certainly in its favour.

Your colleague’s comments about finding things difficult to find are very interesting. The site holds a lot of information for a lot of different types of user and we’ve tried to make it as intuitive as possible.

I’m very keen to make the site as user-friendly as possible. There are many ways on the site to send feedback and though we’ve only been live for a week I’m hungry for it. Using the CMS I can move/copy/connect pages easily and use friendly URLs and meta values to try and anticipate what the user needs.

I know that it has been a long wait for the new site but I think it’s been worth it. In many ways, having just gone live, we’re back at the beginning – having to think again about how best to use the site.

Thanks for your comments – keep ‘em coming.

I’m glad someone else has got round to doing this - I reckon I’ve done my bit on rounding up blogs and podcasts when they were still quite new to the sector (about a year ago!)

London region ICT champion - The Voluntary Sector on Youtube - Part 1:

first in a regular round-up how the voluntary sector is using video to tell the story of what they do and how it makes a difference and covers stories from the deeply personal, to open source, to campaigning adverts to the political.

An interesting discussion on Charity Web Forum (a Yahoo group) on charity presence in the Second Life virtual world has thrown up a reference to the energy consumption involved. See Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians, where one comment says “Looking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That’s the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles (or a Prius around 4,000).” So probably not a place for environmental groups to be seen!

I find it a bit surprising that there seems to be one web server for every 3 or 4 avatars, but then that’s probably covered elsewhere re the sustainability of the business model. And I haven’t read all the comments.

As Ogilvy advertising agency has seen fit to email us a 4MB Word document containing half a dozen pics from Save the Children Fund virtual yak fundraising on Second Life, least we can do is post one here. Take it as our season’s greetings!

(First time I’ve posted a pic on WordPress, so apologies if there’s a glitch.)