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Announcing the date of our next Barcamp Nonprofits London and looking for volunteers
Dear Readers and Barcampers,
it has been a few weeks since our last event and the organisers have been working hard to identify the best opportunities for future events.
Date of our next London event!
Today we are happy to announce that listening to your feedback we have decided to organise our next London event on 28th of September 2012. We will be announcing the venue closer to the date.
Do you want to volunteer?
Some of our attendees expressed their interest in volunteering for our next event. We are looking for people who can help us on the day (registrations, food, setting up the venue) and with social media coverage (official event bloggers). What do we offer in exchange? We will provide you with a ticket to the event (others will register on first come basis) and with references. If you want to be a part of our volunteers team please fill out this short form and we will finalise the group shortly after 15th of May. In case if you are new to the idea of Barcamp Nonprofits, please check the tweets from the event here.
Do you have ideas for our events?
We will be meeting in London on the 21st of May. If you want to join us for a drink and add your ideas to our planning, please RSVP here.
What is Barcamp Nonprofits – video by FireFly Photofilms!
We would like to thank our friends from FireFly Photofilms for all the work at our London event and for this one – it will help our future attendees prepare for their participation!
BarcampNFP photos by @darthberne!
Bernard Galewski aka @darthberne uploaded his photos from our London event. Thank you for joining us, Bernard, and for being our official photographer!;)
Session Notes by Janet Gunter: Crowdfunding – opportunities and risks for NGOs
World Development Movement and Foodcycle presented two examples of how they used crowdfunding campaigns to engage supporters, and we discussed what can be learned from this. For background on crowdfunding, see the Wikipedia entry.
Pontus shared an example of a sequence of crowdfunding campaigns hosted on WDM’s website, that were used to engage supporters in advocacy work – from writing the report, to inviting an expert to parliament, to paying for the filming of street theater in Westminster. He said it was successful and increased engagement. WDM did not adopt the “all or nothing” ethic of Kickstarter and famous crowdfunding platforms, and admittedly might have had difficulty convincing supporters that these activities would not happen without their timely support. Pontus said these fundraising drives were a new form of engagement, and while they are not the end-all, as funds are extremely restricted, the fundraising people were quite positive about them.
Challenges:
- The question of giftaid? Is this a gray area?
- Thinking of “gifts” to give that are not too time/labor intensive
- Timing and frequency: important to only attempt this a couple of times a year
Tips:
“Gifts” that are symbolic or experiential are easiest. Also allow supporters to choose whether they even want the gift in the first place. Fun and creativity are natural matches with crowdfunding.
Steven (@steven0hawkes) told us about how they hosted a crowdfunding campaign on a third party site (PeopleFund.It) to pay for the launch of the Foodcycle café. The site was new, and Foodcycle was one of a couple of successful campaigns. PeopleFund.It use an all-or-nothing approach, so Foodcycle could convince supporters that without their extra help in promoting and getting more donations, the project would not happen. (But this also added a lot of pressure on Foodcycle staff.) In the first 85 days they raised £1800 from the ‘usual suspects’, and they needed to reach £5000 within a week. So staff spent extra time on Twitter, asking for £2 donations from people and having people spread the word in their networks. This Twitter blitz really paid off and the campaign raised the £3200 in lightning time. Not on this, the Twitter buzz and excitement around the campaign engaged new supporters in a new way. The tweet gained 500 supporters in that week, and many of these people are still communicative and promoting Foodcycle.
Challenges:
- A social media blitz can require huge amounts of staff time.
- Using a third party site means that you may actually fail and end up with nothing – and no giftaid with these third party site.
- There is also no “flagship” leading crowdfunding site in the UK
Tips: Use Twitter! Ask for small donations, and take advantage of network effects. Think of a campaign as MORE than the fundraising, it is a way of engaging the networks of your supporters. Be brave, as often these campaigns only get funded at the last minute, it’s part of the experience.
Take aways and things to think about
- For non-profits, crowdfunding is more about mobilizing the crowd than the funding per se.
- We could view these as “telethon 2.0” – but instead of appealing via guilt, we are appealing to people’s generative and creative side. These campaigns are about doing and making things.
- Think about leveraging your campaigns with matched donations, or using a campaign to “top up” a grant.
- Crowdfunding is disruptive and playful – think about how it can fit institutionally. It can be empowering for creative staff members or constituents. Try to convince key people to give it a try.
(Thank you for sharing your notes, Janet!)
Update: Please check the comments section for additional points!
New project to transform young people’s internet skills launches today – attendee guest post
London, Tuesday 21 February 2012
A new report by Demos shows that less than one in 10 young people ask who made a website and why. Digital Disruption, a project by Bold Creative that launches today, is designed to transform the way young people navigate the internet. Digital Disruption aims to improve young people’s digital judgement by combining traditional critical thinking skills with ‘new’ knowledge about how the digital world works, such as understanding search engines and YouTube.
The Digital Disruption website is a one-stop-hub for teaching these skills across the UK curriculum. It hosts a new suite of free, interactive resources and lesson plans for Years 7-13 and presents the latest news and research around digital literacy: www.digitaldisruption.co.uk
Rebecca Ford, Director of Digital Disruption, said:
“Young people are bombarded with bewildering amounts of information online on a daily basis – much of it good, much of it bad – and they need to be equipped to seek out fact from fiction so they can navigate the web on their own terms. We’ve seen first hand from workshops across the UK that young people lack these skills, and teachers are not being provided with the training and resources to teach them – Digital Disruption is the answer.”
Following a successful two year pilot, Bold Creative partnered with Nominet Trust and Demos to research digital literacy in the UK and bring Digital Disruption to a national audience. Demos’ ‘Truth, Lies and the Internet’ report found teachers are worried about their pupils’ digital skills: 99 per cent of teachers surveyed think digital judgement is an important skill for their pupils to possess but they rated their pupils’ skills as below average. Teachers across different subjects lack the resources and training to teach this.
In the past year young people have worked with education, research and media professionals on Digital Disruption to develop resources that respond to key issues identified in Demos’ report. The teaching tools can be used on their own or as an extended framework of work around online source checking, deconstructing propaganda, conspiracy theories and much more.
Website: http://digitaldisruption.co.uk
Jamie Bartlett, Senior Research at Demos and author of “Truth, Lies and The Internet”, said:
“When it comes to the ‘truth’ on the Internet, sorting the wheat from the chaff can be difficult. You need to think beyond Google results. Why did Google give you those results? Why are those ads related? Internet safety is more than stopping bullying and financial scams – it is about making sure young people are sceptical, discerning users of the Internet.
Teaching young people how to navigate the web critically requires a new suite of skills appropriate for the digital age: how search engines work, how websites are designed, or the strengths and limits of open source editing. Ensuring students are equipped with these critical thinking skills should be at the heart of every school curriculum, and the Digital Disruption project provides the resources and tools to meet this need. Every school should take their tools and use them in the classroom.”
Annika Small, Director of Nominet Trust, said:
“We should be giving young people the know-how to safely access the vast array of opportunities that digital technology presents, rather than locking or blocking it. Young people’s digital savvy is often overestimated by the older generation, which is why projects such as Digital Disruption are so valuable. These resources give young people the skills they need to critically evaluate the information that is presented to them via the Internet.”
(We hope to collaborate with this project in our plans for Barcamp Kids in Tech, so stay tuned!)
Share your thoughts about Barcamp Nonprofits!
This weekend we have seen three blog post about our Friday event. Laila, one of our organisers, summed up her Social Media Week experiences in this post. Louise has taken the idea of Google+ hangouts and created her own event so do join her next Friday on Google Plus – for more details please read her post. James was really good in sharing his feedback on Twitter on the day and has already posted his thoughts on the content of the barcamp, but also on the event itself here. We really, really appreciate all this feedback and as we are waiting for more post we are also starting to put together ideas and recommendations for the next event. As mentioned on Friday, to help us organise a bigger, better and louder event please share all your thoughts on-line!
We have collected all Instagram photos here so you can connect – do check all the registration posts there and on Pinterest too. We have also created a Flickr group for you to add your photos to! Use it!
I will be putting together my personal write up, response to feedback on my blog and I hope to see your posts too!
Thank you for joining us on Friday!
Notes from barcampnfp
photo by @spirals
Thanks to everyone who came and made the day so great. A good barcamp only happens when you’ve got the right people together.
We’ll be brewing up plans for follow-up/s. But in the meantime here’s a storify of the day. And remember: Please send us links to your blog posts so we can repost here too.
[View the story "Barcamp Nonprofits London 2012" on Storify]
Finding us tomorrow, registering
Yes, we are meeting tomorrow!:) We had very few cancellations so we hope that more than 100 people will arrive to the venue with no problems. The address again is EC2A 3SG, 19-22 Charlotte Road. But to make it a bit more easier here is the map:
If you want to save the Google Maps location on your phone, please use this code:
As always, you all have our mobile number, so ring us if you have any problems.
Once you arrive to the venue you will be able to grab a coffee and around 9.30-10AM (depending on how quickly we can set up the place) we will open the registration. All you need to bring is your ticket or download the Eventbrite app and show us your ticket on your phone.
See you tomorrow!
Two more sponsors – Blackbaud and the Browser!
We would like to thank Blackbaud for joining our sponsor list! Their mobile and social media tools are an interesting tool for charities so it will be great to chat to them tomorrow!
The Browser have also joined our list this week, so please check their site as its a great place for quality content if you have a minute for a good read.
Thank you for sponsoring our event!