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,...

A

Why Does the Youth Voice Matter? There are a few facts not in dispute that tell a troubling story, that the next 50 years will be off-the-charts. Talk to a climate scientist, an economist, petroleum geologist, or a technologist and you notice a trend. The scale of change over the next 50 years is simply unforeseen. Greenhouse gas emissions, peak oil, population, economic growth, spread of the internet and mobile phones — things are changing at unprecedented and fantastic rates. Yet the key decisions about the response to these dynamics are being made now, locking us into different pathways: of building a sustainable society or one that plunges headlong into an ecological crisis; of tackling extreme poverty and social justice or a stratified society of a jet-set elite and grinding...

There seems to be a strange obsession with New York Times columnists from their lofty perch to denigrate the youth climate movement as quiet, timid, or dare I say it…apathetic. I guess as young people we just don’t quite get the magnitude of the climate crisis. Al Gore said, “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers, and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.” as reported in Nicholas Kristof’s article, The Big Melt. Friedman unloaded this one on us today. America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for...