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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
10 February 2011 – 2:36 pm
Last wednesday saw the start of a flurry of tweets on Twitter all with the hashtag of #whatstigma describing the Tweeter’s mental health issue. It co-incided with the launch of No health without mental health, the cross-governmental outcomes strategy for mental health in England. It all started with a tweet from actor Rebecca Front (@rebeccafront), [...]
21 January 2011 – 1:36 pm
A while back the policy staff and myself put our heads together to come up with a list of the best ebulletins and newsletters for those working in the third sector. It stemmed from a conversation with someone new into a job that wanted to keep up to date with goings on but was new [...]
At the end of last year I was particularly busy publicising the findings of our 6-monthly Surviving NOT Thriving survey. We’ve been taking the temperature of the third sector in the North East over the past 2 years to see how various events such as the recession and the current public sector cuts are affecting [...]
8 December 2010 – 1:25 pm
Users of Facebook this week will have noticed that a lot of their friends have turned into cartoon characters this week. A campaign has snowballed across the social networking site spread through people changing their profile picture to their favourite childhood cartoon character and posting a comment to ask others to do the same ‘to [...]
10 November 2010 – 2:48 pm
Ive just come back from a training course on using Social Media for charities. It provoked some interesting conversations amongst the attendees, mainly all from small organisations around the region. One of the biggest gripes we all had was that social media has been bolted on to the typical communications worker role, without necessarily removing [...]
There’s a lot of controversy going on in the social enterprise world about a poll that Social Enterprise magazine carried on its website. It follows the Coalition’s recent decision to slash funding for its strategic partners programme and reduce the amount of strategic partners it will fund in the future from 40 to around 15. [...]
2009 was considered ‘the year of Twitter’ by the media and Facebook claims to have 20 million users in the UK. It’s getting hard for even die-hard technophobes to argue that social media is a flash in the pan that won’t impact on the way that we work. Capacitybuilders funds two organisations working at a [...]