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Tomorrow we are leaving for Uganda for 21 days. I am as excited as I am nervous.
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Here is an overview of the first week of our trip:
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Matthew here – with an update on what we got up to last night in sunny SW12.
Julia Bellis, who is programme managing the project brought together the motley crue of Rory MacDonald, Ghazwan Hamdan, Patrick Sinclair and little me to review progress of the Buy a Brick campaign which will be launching later this year. We’re building an interactive virtual wall, which will allow you to purchase your very own ‘brick’ by making a donation to the charity. With every brick, you’ll be able to write a little message of good wishes, or even a dedication – and then see everyone else’s donation by browsing around. We like to think it is a visual representation of what our charity is all about, by working together in small steps to build a much bigger end result.
Ghazwan has done some amazing designs for the virtual wall itself, Rory will be building the wall in Flash so it animates and interacts beautifully and Patrick has already done a large amount of work on pulling together all the code in the background which will allow you to buy the brick and add it to the wall.
It has been a truly collaborative project, and quite a learning curve for some of us – I’ve set up plenty of e-commerce solutions in the past, but when you’re working as a charity, different rules and legislation apply, so we’ve been held up by some things, but the energy hasn’t been dampened despite the red tape, and we’re on track for a launch in the early Summer (and by the looks of the weather here today, that’s just around the corner!)
You can see more pictures at the flickr group.
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
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.
Last night, I stayed at my great Aunty Pat’s. She is 83 and likes making teddy bears, so I was suddenly struck by an idea – I’ve asked her to make 50 teddy bears, one for each of our babies.
Great Aunty Pat's teddy bear
She thinks it will take two years – I’m hoping it won’t take us quite as long to build the actual home…
Whilst we were discussing teddy bears, I ran a few initiatives of the charity by her.
As you may know, I come from the world of TV and we pride ourselves on the number of celebrities we can name drop in a single paragraph.
How can we use that to our advantage when it comes to fundraising?
Well, we are in the process of building a virtual wall at the moment so that our supporters can help build the actual home by purchasing bricks for themselves or their friends and family. Collette Callus, a friend, assistant producer and super-supporter of Child’s i Foundation has already suggested we pool all of our celeb contacts and ask them to purchase exclusive “golden bricks”. We think this a grand idea.
How many celebrities do you know, or know of, who might be happy to support us by donating a small portion of their great riches?
Aunty Pat gave us her short list: George Clooney (“he’s quite attractive”), Noel Edmonds (“he makes wishes come true”), and her all-time favourite celebrity, Lulu (“what a voice!”) So there you go, Aunty Pat has suggested the first three celebrities. We will do our best to get them involved.
Back to our main aim though – it’s not all celebrities and teddy bears. We are establishing a worldwide community of supporters to work together to build a home for abandoned babies in Uganda. We have been referring to this process and ourselves as “charity 2.0” as we are using internet-based tools to help achieve this.
But is all this techno-speak double-dutch to most people? To find out I am jumping straight in at the deep end – next Monday I’m going to give a talk about our charity to the Rotherfield St Martin’s senior citizen group. It will be an interesting exercise to see if they understand the concept – and how well I can explain it…
I popped up to the village hall to do some research and talk to a few of the local seniors and potential “silver surfers” . I was excited to discover that a few of them have decided to enrol in Internet lessons to find out what all the fuss is about.
I had a great response, especially from Marjorie and Doreen who were happy to tell me on Flip camera about their experience of the Internet.
Link: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=pcvgdbiZvyg
Next visit – we are going run a focus group with 16 – 18 year olds who all have squillions of Facebook friends to ask their opinion and get them on our team.
Child's i Foundation 
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