Development Blogs.com

We’re going all new media here for the next while, thanks to a day’s inspiration from the Institute of Fundraising’s New Media Conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday (we go so you don’t have to). So to kick off, here’s 5 tips we picked up for better new media fundraising. 1. The best way to use SMS is ‘capture and convert’. Forget premium services - half the money is going to the network and service providers - and use capture and callback instead. Encourage people to send a text - a message of support, a text petition, whatever - and then call them back and ask them if they’ll consider a gift, or better still a direct debit. 2. Monitor social networks to see what people are saying about you You may not have a strategy to use youtube, facebook,...

OK then. Everyone back at their desks and back into the groove? Refreshed and raring to go? Good. Well I reckon it’s time to kick this blog back into gear. So here’s ten things you might want to think about for 2007 to make your organisation more effective; your donors more engaged; and the world a better place. 1. When are we going to see chief executives of Irish charities blogging? Clarissa Baldwin, the chief executive of the Dogs Trust has a blog. The CEO of Sun Microsystems has a blog. As do other corporate CEOs. Why not Justin Kilcullen or Fergus Finlay? (to be fair, Justin has dabbled. But why not make it a regular feature?) 2. Reduce your organisation’s carbon footprint. We’re fast running out of time to make the changes that have to be made to stop climate...

Houtlust have some great photos of Greenpeace’s event outside the Apple Store in New York calling for Apple to ‘go Green’. Currently Apple are lagging way behind other electronics companies in terms of their environmental practices. And then there’s the Greenpeace Green Apple website which is a parody of Apple’s own website. It even has a ProCreate section, where you’re encouraged to design your own campaign t-shirt or TV ad (well, plenty of creatives are Apple users). And there’s plenty of online activism tools - from standardised blog tags to pre-prepared emails to Steve Jobs. Technorati Tags: eMarketing, online activism, greenmyapple, greenpeace, environment...

I know I’m probably being a little obsessive here, but please, bear with me. I use Flickr to upload photos and images for this site. It’s a nice, easy way to organise the images and means I don’t have to use FTP anytime I want to put up a picture. So far so good. But then, during October, I started getting referrals from Flickr. In fact, Flickr is now the second most common referral site after Google. Which means people are going to Flickr, clicking on a link, and landing on this site. What, you may ask, is the problem? Well, in the spirit of optimising my links and increasing traffic to the website and all that jazz, I went looking for the link. I assumed it would be somewhere on the askdirect Flickr account or in my profile. I searched, but couldn’t find...