Digital Charities A digital charity skills forum for the third sector

Our next meetup will be held on Wednesday 3rd April at 4pm at the WSPA offices.

The topic is yet to be confirmed, so please add suggestions in the comments.
After the previous meeting, Susan suggested a session reviewing our websites and sharing what’s worked, and what we’d want to change. Definitely scope for that – interesting integrations, how mobile friendly is your site currently, etc.

Any other thoughts, or if you’re keen on the above please let us know!

More on this soon, but just to get it in your diaries.

Our March meeting is being convened by Anoop Maini, and will be focused on SEO and more generally advertising.

Please give us your suggestions for what you’d like to cover and we’ll have more info about the agenda soon.

**Please note owing to room availability we’ll be located in ActionAid again, rather than WSPA as originally stated**
When: 4pm, 6th March
Where: ActionAid, 33-39 Bowling Green Lane, EC1R 0BJ

As Oscar / general film awards season is upon us, the subject for the next Digital Charities meeting is video. Please come along and share your experiences, best-practices, blockbuster tips and advice for avoiding Kevin-Costner style flops.

We’ll be chatting about planning, making, and promoting video – from zero budget to not-quite-as-much-as-Titanic-cost budget.

If you’d like to nominate a video for a Digital Charity ‘Oscar’ (along with a category) please link to them in the comments below – alternatively if there’s a video you’d like to talk about, found inspiring or engaging, or featured a technique that you think has campaigning potential add those as well.

When: 6th February
Where: ActionAid, 33-39 Bowling Green Lane, London

Pete’s bringing the popcorn…

Agenda

(suggestions welcome in the comments below!)

• Hopefully we can have a discussion about some of the below – please add any example videos to the comments below
• Planning the screenplay, location, concept and ideas
• Filming – from cinematography to special effects and sound… what makes the perfect charity video?
• Publishing – formats (is youtube still the main distributer, or is 6 second films the next big thing?)
• Marketing – (perhaps put this at the beginning ) how many times have you been asked to ‘make it go viral?’
• For your consideration.. – what makes a brilliant video, what makes a terrible video?
• Next month meeting ideas

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Aggy, the international digital campaigner at ActionAid. Tom and Ben have handed January’s Digital Charities meeting over to me to convene (i.e. I will be there with tea and biscuits) – so please come along! Leave a comment or a message on our Facebook page if you’re coming.

Here are the details for this month’s meeting:

The proposed subject for this meeting’s discussion: growing your list. It’s a biggie, because often with online campaigning you need big numbers of people taking action in order for your targets respond – as well as to get pick up on blogs, media and by activist communities.
This discussion could involve:

• Paid for data: experiences and questions about Change.org, Care2 and others
• Supporter journeys for new recruits: how to keep them on board/take them up the ladder of engagement
• Different platforms: experiences/ideas on recruiting via social networks

Or any other points people want to discuss! Do come along and take part, or let me know ahead of time if you would like to talk about anything else.

When: 9th January (this Wednesday!)
Where: ActionAid, 33-39 Bowling Green Lane, London

You are all very welcome indeed, please do come if you can – let’s share/create some ideas about list building!

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As agreed in our November meeting, we're opening up the organising of our meetings (call it crowdsourcing if you like!) so please leave a comment if you're interested in running a meeting.

If you also have a subject that you'd be interested in talking about, that would be very useful.

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Here are some of the links that were mentioned in the meeting. Please add others to the comments:

• Some pretty email marketing examples
• Just Unfollow – a tool for managing your Twitter accounts
• TweetAdder – another Twitter mass account adder / killer

The November meeting will be happening at 4pm on Thursday 15th, most likely at ActionAid, 33-39 Bowling Green Lane, EC1R 0BJ – ask at reception. The meetings normally wrap up about 6pm, where the conversations are generally taken up again in a nearby pub for anyone who is interested.

So far the suggestions we’ve had for topics to cover include:

• Project: SMS World Food Day project from ActionAid (Tom)
• Topic: Email reactivation (Mary)
• Topic: Handling trolls (Kaye)
• Topic: Photo campaigning tools / ideas (Hannah)
• Topic: What do we want from e-campaigning tools? (tbc)
• Admin: Changing how we run Digital Charities. Volunteers to take on organising our monthly meetings.
• Party: Christmas / Winter social. Dates that work, where do we want to go?

That’s a lot to cover, so we may have to vote at the beginning to see who is there, and what they’d like to talk about. If you have any other suggestions, please either add them to the email chain, or in the comments below.

**UPDATE** It sounds like most people sensibly took this week as holiday or are otherwise not around, so we might have to skip June. Check the Facebook page for the latest.

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Just quickly posting a note to say the next meeting is on for Wednesday June 6th at 4pm, location to be confirmed.

The popular vote from the last meeting was that we should talk about mobile, which could be anything from SMS to apps. If you feel strongly about a particular area and would like to discuss it, drop it into the comments here, or on Facebook.