Policy area: Communications

North East’s most influential Twitter users

Twitter, the social media tool, is becoming an increasingly useful way to reach people of influence.  One retweet from an influential Twitter user can send your message through to thousands of followers, even go global.  With this in mind I have gathered a list here of who I believe to be the North East’s most [...]

Stop this unfair news tax on charities

CharityComms has launched a campaign this week to exempt charities from paying a fee for sharing online news articles. I am wholeheartedly behind this campaign which seems grossly unfair and an unnecessary burden on charities at a time when many are closing down due to funding cuts. Im also very disappointed to see The Guardian [...]

Charities and business coming together on Twitter

I followed throughout October a great example of using social media by a local business that wanted to form links with local charities. Benfield Motor Group ran an online campaign called Charity Drive for its customers (or ‘friends’ as they like to call them) to nominate a charity from the North East, Cumbria and Yorkshireto [...]

My own little campaign to rename St James Park!

There has been uproar today in the media from local footie fans from the unpopular decision to rename St. James Park to Sports Direct Arena by current owner Mike Ashley.  Apparently its temporary until they sell the naming rights to the stadium to any other interested party.  And its all in the interests of making [...]

Is it time to ditch the ‘traditional’ website?

I spotted an interesting article about Bar chain Varsity dropping its website.  It hasn’t given up on the internet of course, it’s just moved all of its digital content onto Facebook, reasoning that 96% of students (its target audience) uses Facebook daily, so lets go where our audience ‘lives’. It got me thinking about charities [...]

Facebook changes we should know about

Facebook has made a flurry of changes recently to the way it operates, with its largest change to date happening tomorrow. This will change people’s profile pages into a timeline of interactions with Twitter that can be scrolled up and down over the years. Basically it turns all your old posts, photos, likes etc into [...]

The risks of giving up paper editions

I noticed on return from a couple of weeks off that NCVO have decided to ditch the print version of their members magazine ‘Engage’. They are making the switch to a digital only version, available online. The decision was based on what their members had asked for and cost savings. It’s a tricky decision.  I’m [...]

Ever more catching up to do…

I’m pleased to see a few reports recently which discuss the state of our ICT infrastructure and the need for our sector to further embrace digital technologies. Martha Lane Fox, the UK’s digital champion informed Third Sector magazine that she thinks charities need to invest in their websites in order to survive and that they [...]

Bish, Bash, Bosh.

I’m increasingly drawn these days to the various debates emanating from the Our Society network. There’s some really good stuff going on there so check it out if you get the chance. It was whilst on the site the other day that I was spring-boarded to observations made by Kevin Harris after a Julian Dobson [...]

Local charities making national headlines

It was great to see 2 local charities making national headlines this week. First up I spotted A Way Out, former VONNE award winners, in the Metro newspaper.  Their Chief Executive Jessie Joe Jacobs was warning that alcohol abuse may kill a growing number of women unless something is done to stop ‘crazily’ low drinks [...]