You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘linkedin’ tag.
Comic Relief last night raised a record £57 million for good causes in Africa and Britain. This was an incredible £17 million more than their previous record. It just goes to show that even in a severe economic crisis people still want to give. Most importantly people want to get involved and show support by taking part in their own fundraising initiatives.
Collaboration and enjoyment are the driving forces behind the success of Comic Relief. Child’s i Foundation can only dream and aspire to such success and brand recognition, but our philosophy is similar – we believe in individual contribution (give what you can in measurements of time, money or love) and together, as a community, we will achieve our goals.
This belief system runs through everything we do: step forward the “Together to Uganda” Team:
I’m Katee Hui and I am the Programme Manger for the Together to Uganda team.
Together to Uganda Team
I have the privilege of working with a small, dedicated team of young people from Beacon Community College who have great ideas and a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. My team members are:
- Hannah Jones: Communications officer
- Matt Burton: Technology Strategist
- Sophie Phillips: Operations co-ordinator
- Tom Lawson: Marketing and advertising officer
- Alex Colville: Public outreach officer
- Chris Chater: Design officer
- Natalie Phillips (Deputy Programe Manager): Community and University Outreach
Our first campaign, Together to Uganda is all about mobilising people to collaborate and cumulatively travel the distance to Uganda through various means.
- The distance is 4012 miles or 6457km
- The idea is for various contributors to collaborate and cover this distance by a combination of different modes of transport. From skiing to sailing, running to skipping, between groups of people
I will be co-ordinating the team and its activities. My job is to help run the campaign, from the marketing and advertising side to the technological requirements and logistics. Currently, we’re working on the our strategy, target lists and timeline. Each team member has their own role too – to cover all of the bases so we can run a successful campaign.
p.s. Check out this T-shirt from Howies. We love it because it just about sums up our campaign. If you fancy having a go at designing something specifically for Together to Uganda along the same lines please get in touch.
Together to Uganda - Individual vs. Group effort
As ever it has been go-go-go at Child’s i Foundation HQ but whilst we cogitate and procrastinate over the nitty gritty of virtal bricks and mortar, Twitter anxiety and merchant trading accounts, our supporters are out there raising the money to make the real stuff happen.
It was tough but last night we had to dance the night away at Ginglik in Shepherds Bush, London, courtesy of The Golden Manor Medicine Show (Adam Adler, Jules Fuller, Ali Hawkins, Neil Webster and special guests) to magnificent covers of The Felice Brothers, Langhorne Slim, Dylan, The Band, Johnny Cash, Josh Ritter, The Stones, Muddy Waters and a couple of their own.
Approx £400 was raised thanks to the band and a few collection buckets. We highly recommend you follow the band on Facebook and watch out for their next gig.
The Golden Manor Medicine Show at Ginglik
Meanwhile across the waters in Japan Child’s i Foundation supporter Brent Simmonds organised a charity golf day in Japan and raised £175.
Undress for Uganda continues its glorious reign with the latest event raising £408. Since UFU has already taken on a life of its own we thought it deserved its very own Facebook fan page. Please feel free to share your tips and ideas here to help others host a great party.
Julien Buckley has started to plan his epic cycle journey in July. The route is not yet certain but suffice to say it will be between 1,200 – 2,500 miles some where in Scandinavia. He is planning to tackle it alone but he would welcome offers of companionship from other (crazy?) cyclists – Watch his progress on his blog.
Never one to shy away from a challenge herself and unwilling to let our supporters take all the glory, Lucy Buck is leading by example and has committed to jumping out of a plane. Please sponsor the crazy lady on Justgiving.
And finally, if all you’re looking for is a night of romance and dirty glamour we can help you with that as well. Kirsty Mitchell is running Child’s i Foundation’s first speed-dating event burlesque style on 23rd March 2009. The tickets are like gold-dust so email Kirsty directly if you would like to join in the fun.
Keep those fundraising ideas coming …
Last night, Lucy and I were privileged and honoured to attend one of The Spectator Digital Dinners hosted by the editor Matthew d’Ancona (our Child’s i Foundation patron), held in their offices in Old Queen Street – right in the middle of Westminster. As well as some key members of The Spectator digital team, we shared a table with an interesting mix of some amazing political minds, media gurus, music movers’n'shakers and advertising industry impresarios.
Our patron Matthew d’Ancona previously gave a bit of background on why he holds these events:
Link to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8PYABLDViw
Last night’s focus was a discussion with Ian Leslie, author of To be President: Quest for the White House 2008 and influential blog Marbury.
Leslie gave us a summary of his understanding of Obama’s groundbreaking and hugely successful victory. A victory enabled by the technologies the web has given us to build a community, but driven by a deftly controlled team of passionate people who planned their campaign with meticulous exactitude. The whole campaign was also cleverly documented and visualised from day one and became a real life political entertainment show.
But the true brilliance of Obama’s campaign was that he enabled participation at a grassroots level. He (and his team of campaigners) asked people directly for help and made it clear to his community that this potentially astonishing victory was entirely in their hands.
Lucy and I kept winking and nodding at each other from opposite sides of the table with the general excitement of all of this. We believe our charity is a micro-version of Obama’s campaign – well you know, sort of!
Importantly, we know that we need every donation of time, love or money our community of supporters can give us. Our belief is that all of our supporters are stakeholders in our success and the combined force of our drive for this success will build a babies’ home in Uganda and will ensure our home has a sustainable future.
So after dinner, as is our way, we promptly got to work letting people know about our charity and that we needed their help. As has become a regular and heartwarming feature of our campaign and our astonishing story to date is that they all truly wanted to “give” in some way.
If you want to help our campaign, find out how you can give love and time by getting involved or how you can give money.
What a day. Yesterday properly shifted into gear with Clay Shirky’s lunchtime talk at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts).
The talk was one of the ICA’s “Feedback” season events and as part of their investigation into the effects of networked and social media, they actively encourage the use of recording equipment during talks. So, rather than summarise Shirky’s talk we have uploaded two snippets recorded on the Flip (see our YouTube Channel).
We were dying to ask Shirky, in this changing world, how non-profits and charities could exploit the tools available to us. The microphone didn’t get to us but Lucy did catch up with him as he left the lecture theatre. He showed interest in our charity model and then mentioned his current writing about generosity within community. This will surely change third sector thinking or at least accelerate the change that has started to happen. We hold our breath in anticipation.
Clay Shirky talking at the ICA Feedback session in London
Our inaugural Child’s i Foundation meetup the Old Bank of England last night was testament to Shirky’s thinking that social tools – the internet, mobile phones, applications built on top of those “have provided an antidote to the hassle factor when you try to get a group of people to do something”. We used meetup.com to invite a group of “social innovators and supporters” to join us, to present our plans and ideas to them face-to-face and to ask for their feedback and involvement.
Link to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKXqB9pD-gQ
The evening was just so enjoyable. A group of 40 interesting and varied people offered us their time, helped us understand how to recruit and organise better, they committed to sporting and community fundraising events, offered us their expert technical expertise, architectural skills and marketing ideas. It didn’t even end at pub closing time. Several meetup community members have written to us today with ideas and incredible offers such as donating percentage profits from their new business to the charity and expert social work advice.
Talking, listening, collaborating, interacting at meetup
People travelled into London from other parts of the country for this event, people who didn’t previously know us personally but have connected with us online and understand our cause.
We are truly grateful to be able to collaborate and receive direct feedback from our community and look forward together to making this a really enjoyable venture to be part of.
The slideshow presentation from the evening is here on SlideShare.com
Our first ever meetup
One of our supporters, Sarah Eddy, noticed that one of the items on our to do list was to come up with a tagline for our marketing material:
From Sarah:
Hey team! I’ve been having a think about a slogan for the foundation and discovered it to be quite an addictive past time! I’ve started a discussion topic on it so other people can contribute, and hopefully between us we’ll come up with something fantastic (and a little smug feeling that we chipped in without actually doing much at all!) anyway, take a look, see what you come up with! x
Sarah’s great Facebook debate has resulted in much creativity and some excellent ideas.
What do you think our tagline should be?
THIS POLL HAS NOW CLOSED – RESULTS AS FOLLOWS:
| our home is the first step |
37 34%
|
|---|---|
| building hope, building homes |
25 23%
|
| i am loved, i am wanted, i am home |
19 17%
|
| a home built together |
6 6%
|
| building homes from home |
4 4%
|
| building homes on strong foundations |
3 3%
|
| together, we can build hope |
2 2%
|
| a home for babies built together |
2 2%
|
| building families, let’s do it together |
1 1%
|
| building babies’ homes |
1 1%
|
| making families |
1 1%
|
| from vulnerability to well-being |
0 0%
|
| Other (see below) |
8 7%
|
|
Other Answer |
Votes |
|---|---|
| building hope for the children of Uganda | 1 |
| buliding homes, building hope | 1 |
| building and finding homes for babies | 1 |
| keeping babies safe and sound | 1 |
| building foundations of hope | 1 |
| bringing children home | 1 |
| Bringing hope | 1 |
| Buidling baby houses | 1 |
We are very encouraged by this post from Jude Habib from Third Sector Daily. Jude is looking forward to a sea change in attitudes to social media within the third sector.
When it comes to digital media, it’s time for the sector to get with the programme, says Jude Habib
Social media is clearly very important to us, not only for building our global community of supporters but also reaching our fundraising targets.
We’re not fixated by numbers. But how can we fail to be impressed by the fact that we have gathered over 1000 supporters on our Facebook group in just over a month. Not only that – we’ve also had over 8000 visits to our blog.
1000 supporters - a mini milestone
But what have we done to deserve this? Well, we’ve launched a website, started twittering/tweeting, added our photos to Flickr and made a few videos. OK, so maybe I’m making this all sound extremely simple – and of course it has required hard work and dedication from all involved – but compared to other forms of branding, marketing and fundraising activity it is pretty straightforward, rewarding (in that we actually get to have a conversation with our supporters) and economical (free in most cases).
We are simply using existing tools to reach out to social networking communities that are already present, ready and willing to get involved.
We know this isn’t the only way, we need to go to our supporters (not expect them to find us) and not all of them are hanging out in social networking communities everyday or reading RSS feeds from blogs
We are thinking of initiatives to reach out to schools, colleges and the workplace – encouraging supporters to fundraise in their local communities. We have a face-to-face “meetup” group in London on 4th February, Undress for Uganda we hope will happen in living rooms throughout the country (in our dreams the world) and to appeal the hearts of celebrities we will write letters.
We’re not bound only to the realms of socia media, we just know we’re missing a trick if we don’t talk to those who are willing to speak to us.
Recent Comments