ICT Champion

A new report by the Charities Aid Foundation raises concerns that cash donations are falling sharply as credit card payments and regular direct debits become more common. A 22% drop in cash donations, coupled with a predicted fall in charitable income on the back of the credit crunch is seen as a particular threat to smaller charities - in other words the vast majority of organisations supported by CVS and other infrastructure bodies in local networks across the south east.

Given the costs involved most small charities will not be able to afford to set up credit card payments, but there are several online systems which could help avoid the worst effects of this change. Here is a quick round of three of the best known and ideas about how to use them.

The best known of these is Just Giving, which is very commonly used by people entering large public events, such as the London Marathon, to enable supporters to send their money straight to their chosen cause. Any charity can set up a page on the site, and it currently offers a free 3 month trial, after which it charges £15 per month and 5% per transaction BUT it also adds on Gift Aid when UK resident donors fill in the form provided. They reckon they can turn a £10 donation into about £13.

They have a handy video to explain the concept:

Justgiving Fees - Explained in Video! from Justgiving on Vimeo.

Similar services are available through Charities Aid Foundation's eFundraising service, which includes listing on the CAF website, and www.bmycharity.org.uk, which offers a free Pay As You Go service. This gives you slightly less for each donation but is an ideal way to get started.

Fundraising plans and online promotion

Of course setting up an online payments system in this way is not going to solve anyone's funding problems unless it is part of a more comprehensive fundraising plan. You need to think about who you think will donate to your cause, how you will communicate with them and then find as many ways as possible to advertise and link to your new payments page.

This may include adding a bog to your web site - using Blogger or Wordpress.com for example - or investigating Facebook groups and other new forms of networking to raise your profile and connect with supporters. This may mean a steep learning curve at first but, given the potential financial benefits, and the relative ease with which you can set up payment systems it is definitely a good first step to addressing a significant trend.

A final point is that none of these systems is of any use if you don't have a charity number. Unconstituted groups, social enterprises without a charity number or other organisations will probably have to use PayPal or an equivalent online payments service. There are many services such as this, with all sorts of charging structures, so more research is needed to see which one fits your needs.

Read about trends in giving

Third Sector magazine has a story about the findings of the research and details of the changing patterns in giving at Massive decline in cash giving 'a threat to smaller charities' - Third Sector

Tags: fundraising, ictchampion, scipnews

Here's a catch up after several busy weeks [a bit long, sorry].

3 Nov: Regional ICT Forum, Guildford.

I run a regional forum for anyone involved in ICT-related activities in the voluntary and community sector in the south east. We had a good turn out and spent a very useful couple of hours before lunch talking about how we work with funders to help improve the way that voluntary and community orgs budget for their ICT. This included the input of someone from the Big Lottery Fund and looked at how best to encourage VCOs to think about Total Cost of Onwership when budgeting for ICT - like buying a car and including petrol, insurance and driving lessons in the budget.

There was a lot of support for this work amongst the group but there were also lots of questions about how funders will respond and how we can help them make better decisions. The first step we agreed was to work together on a draft set of guidelines which we ask funders to adopt. We also reviewed other aspects of the proposed regional ICT strategy and came up with plans for workshops about 'How to Buy a Website' which Lucian and I will be running in the new year.

Full notes of the meeting are still in draft I'm afraid, but more to come soon.

6 Nov: RAISE conference/AGM, Oxford.

RAISE is the regional body representing the voluntary and community sector so this was a great opportunity for networking. I learned a lot about Compacts and Local Area Agreements [LAAs] and their relevance to the sector but felt depressed by the presentations by a selection of National Support Services - now known as Improving Support Workstreams. There really is a lot to do to make these worth more than the sum of their very disjointed parts.

7 Nov: Judging the Digital Media Awards: South

A whole day locked in Midnight's basement judging for DiMAS. The other judges were a great bunch and this was a lot of fun. The whole this was very tiring but everyone got a fair crack of the whip and you can see the fruits of our deliberations at www.thedimas.co.uk

The winners are announced at the glittering awards ceremony on 17 November at All Saints Church in Hove, which I'm co-hosting with local funny man Stephen Grant.

I spent the evening celebrating the 10th birthday of the wonderful Working Together Project at a fun-packed event attended by just about everyone who's anyone in the local voluntary sector, and featuring Michelle from Gender Trust's fab stand up routine. I was much less drunk than I expected but also much much more tired than I hoped so went home early.

10 Nov: Big Lottery Fund south east Helper Agencies event, Portsmouth

A nightmare day for journeys but I had a really useful trip to Portsmouth attending an event for Big Lottery Fund [BLF] Helper Agencies [2.5 hours there, 4 hours back!].

These events are run by BLF for funding advisers and other people who provide support to voluntary and community organisations. The aim is to make sure that as many people as possible understand the various funding programmes offered by the Lottery in the region. This session included a great exercise where we had to choose between six funding bids, as if we were on the Lottery Awards panel.

It was a mixed bunch of about 30 people: mainly local authority but lots of voluntary sector organisations such as CVS funding advisers. It was tough exercise but in the end we came to fairly similar conclusions about who we'd give the money to, and I'm now looking forward to delivering a similar workshop in the new year to help people think about budgeting for IT.

12 Nov: Build and Manage Your Own Website, training workshop, Brighton

Libby Davy and I delivered a really positive first session in web design training for a small community org in Coldean, a neighbourhood on the edge of Brighton. This is the first time I've delivered a workshop that uses Wordpress to help groups produce their own website. Everything we prepared went down really well and we had two hours and a group of four to teach, which was a nice gentle introduction. I'm really looking forward to the next session next wednesday evening, to be followed by four more sessions after xmas.

13 Nov. Intellect Third Sector Working Party meeting, London

Intellect is the trade body for the IT indutsry and its swanky Russell Square HQ drew a good mix of people who heard from a great set of speakers including the head of NCVO's Collaboration and ICT Unit, the Digital Inclusion Team who highlighted some great resources and, my fave, Julie from Cosmic who talked about her work in a really inspiring way. Cosmic is the same age and delivers almost exactly the same work as SCIP but is based in beautiful Ottery St Mary in Devon.I have thought of it as SCIP's cousin, but under Julie's guidance it is fast becoming more like a big sister.

I made some good contacts and enjoyed the very positive discussion about supporting use of IT by the third sector. I'm not sure where else this sort of audience may come together so I'm hoping it will continue to grow, esp as a forum for shaping relationships.

Quick catch up with some of the other regional champs afterwards - great to see them and a shame we can't seem to coordinate more face-to-face meetings better/at all.

14 Nov. NetWeight, University of Brighton

I chaired a meeting for NetWeight project, a DoH-funded research programme led by Prof Flis Henwood at Uni of Brighton. It was a lively and very informative session summing up the work we've done to date on the project, and especially reflected on some workshops I helped run. These were about how people could use ICT to self-manage their weight but included introducing complete beginners to blogging, storytelling and redesigning local websites.

I really enjoy being involved in this project and there was a really good mix of people at the meeting, including workshop participants [also known as The Guinea Pigs], members of the research team and partners such as local providers of health information.

Much more work is needed to capture and feed back key issues for the Department of Health, but I'm already building lessons from these workshops into what I'm delivering in my web design workshops in Coldean. I also hope we can do some more work with the participants from these workshops, beyond the life of this project.

17 Nov. Chain Reaction 08

Had a great day out a Chain Reaction event on the south bank in London. As well as crying at the video for Peace One Day, I got to hear Lord Mandelson and Gordon Brown talking up social enterprise we also got to hear from Dragon's Den tall boy Peter Jones, Tim Smit from the fab Eden project and loads of inspiring people out to change the world.

I was a social reporter for the day with David Wilcox leading a busy band of people adding lots of live content to reflect the day's events. The videoboo was an especially eye-catching means of conducting video interviews and beaming them online. I particularly enjoyed mixing it with lots of young people from all sorts of volunteering projects, and learning more about Disruptive Innovation. Very enjoyable train ride home too.

20 Nov: Social Enterprise Day.

Illness had kept me sidelined for a couple of days but I did get an hour with some politics students who wanted to know more about SCIP's work. I took the chance to explain social enterprise and they had some very insightful questions which I hope I answered sensibly.

Other stuff in my head right now:

• talking to people in Kent about how to connect with their project that is supporting development workers across the county
• lots of detailed finance and reporting stuff on the BASIS-funded project I'm managing about embedding IT skills in the vol and comm sector
• back to the Isle of Wight on Monday for more work on their IT volunteer recruitment campaign
• trying to understand who's trying to carve up what from the Government's £1m requests for bids to coordinate a network of Digital Mentors - and how SCIP can be involved
• publicising and organising the BASIS-funded event we're running on 15th December about how people learn IT skills
• recruiting an evaluation consultant for the BASIS-funded Embedded IT project
• planning the next sessions of the wordpress training for the residents of Coldean
• learning my script as co-host of the Digital Media Awards in next Thursday night
• planning SCIP's xmas do

• how to use wordpress.com [our chosen software solution]
• passwords, permissions, getting a webmail account
  
• storytelling skills
  
• teamwork/working with others/collaborative skills
• getting to know the internet - trends, demystifying, searching, etc
• why do it? how can a website help a community association
• roles and responsibilities of a community web site team
• planning: aims, milestones, processes, resources
• planning your site: what it has on it - page structure
• planning your site: what it looks like - pictures, colours, fonts, logos
  
• promoting your site
• working with pictures
• working with sound
• a guided tour of someone else's community website and how they run it
  
• working with video
• building links with others/community networking
• how to get other people involved