A few weeks ago, the Women’s Resource Centre announced they were looking for a new Head of Communications as their current post holder, the incredible Leah Williams, is moving on to pastures new. I have to confess that I looked at it with great anticipation, because back in the day, when I was the information co-ordinator at a small domestic violence charity, if I could have had any job in the voluntary sector then Leah’s job would have been it.  WRC was – and still is – a dynamic organisation staffed by superwomen and that team does amazing things.

In the two years since, I have often said that I would never go back to working for a charity.  Don’t get me wrong: the last charity I worked for was far from being a bad place.  They were at the forefront of creating policies for addressing domestic violence in London and worked with a large number of organisations at all levels to get these policies embedded.  But, like most charities, they were small and underfunded.  There was a lack of development opportunities and my very limited knowledge on all things techie was still the most advanced within the organisation with no one to mentor me.  And as our workload was always immense, projects that I wanted to develop always took a back seat.  

Most frustratingly, looking at all the organisations we worked with back then, many of them had to be dragged kicking and screaming to try out new tools, always too busy, too underfunded, or – the worst thing of all – too closed minded to see their potential.  

To everyone’s benefit, in the last couple of years the development and availability of free and fabulous tools, especially in social media, have made information sharing easier than ever to seamlessly integrate into your daily workflow and engage with a new audience in networking and campaigning activities.

The one thing that I realise now that I have always carried since leaving the sector is the perception of charities in the dark ages who perceive email as being the most advanced method of communication, of having to battle with organisations to simply try a new idea.  Consequently, in retrospect, I’ve realised why I have always been surprised when the charities for which I now consult have welcomed some new ideas on getting their messages across.

I had the privilege of attending my first NFPtweetup a couple of weeks back.  NFPtweetup is a meeting of Twitter users who work with or in non-profit organisations and are interested in harnessing the potential of social media for campaigning, fundraising and supporting activities that do good things in the world.  I met consultants, social enterprises, CSR professionals, agencies and people who have responsibility for communications, information, digital, fundraising and campaigning at their charities.  And they weren’t in the least bit stuffy, skeptical or ignorant of new tools.  They all worked for organisations that were excited about the potential of social media and were embracing it to great benefit for their organisations.  A shining example was I CAN’s Adopt A Word initiative that exploded when Stephen Fry tweeted about it.

I left feeling incredibly inspired by all the organisations present.  I learnt so much about how they had gotten their organisations to buy in to the benefits of social media and what they do to keep their activities current and relevant.  Most staggeringly though, it really made me want to work with non-profits full time again.

One of the interesting people I met was Jack Wilson from Leap Anywhere, an organisation that I can best describe as 'Time Out for good'.  Leap promotes and creates video content of events for good causes all over the country.  This week, I did a brainstorm with Jack and Tom Robbins, Leap’s Head of Content, at their office on some forthcoming activities they have planned.  Their Soho office had a great vibe; their team was huddled around the main table with their laptops, bantering and editing, whilst we were bouncing around ideas on their sofa.  We really had a great meeting.

Much of the advice I was able to give them was gleaned from experience working in the private sector.  I’ve been able to take advantage of training budgets, work with people that have more knowledge and experience of all things online, learn efficient business processes and how to run effective marketing campaigns, and develop and launch projects with all the resources that most charities don’t have.

And that’s exactly why I won’t be applying for the Head of Communications job at WRC.  I realised that I have more fun and I’m much better at working with organisations that do good things, as opposed to in them.  This way, I get the best of both worlds; I’m constantly learning and developing through the work I do with private companies and advising non-profits on how to use what I’ve learnt to move their projects forward.

I hope WRC gets someone good.  If you know anyone, you have the weekend to get your application in!

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting to a PhD student who is looking at getting a job in the financial services sector when he graduates in a couple of years’ time.  Now is a great time to start networking, making contacts, learning about what’s going on in the industry and making yourself known to people that could help you get a job when you graduate.

This PhD student attended a conference in California last week and, in order to kick-start the job hunt, I suggested that he get some business cards to pass around and a website to give himself an online presence and a point of contact.

As my pro bono schedule is on hold at the moment due to a spate of 10 hour days, I made an exception to take this one on as, apart from the fact that the said PhD student, Christopher Dancel, is my youngest brother, I took it as a challenge to design for an individual that wasn’t directly selling a product or service and/or that wasn’t a creative professional.

The brief

As I’m not au fait with all the science content and we didn’t have time to go through it all before he had to leave, we decided a one column layout would suffice for now; I set him up with Amaya and Filezilla so that he could finish writing the content on the plane or in his hotel and simply upload it himself when he was done.

As Christopher will still be using it as a point of reference for his research with his academic peers, it needed to fit alongside academic themed websites (e.g. websites of super traditional universities), while presenting a professional image for potential employers.

Brainstorm

So ultimately, Christopher wants to get a job in the financial services industry.  I got online and looked at the websites of the type of company for which he wants to interview.

PricewaterhouseCoopers UK




UBS Warburg




McKinsey




Deloitte






Barclays




There are many design features that these sites have in common.  The layouts are clean and very functional – almost no-nonsense - with the navigation placed at the top.  They are square, eschewing the rounded corners favoured by their Web 2.0 counterparts, and for the most part, favour the colour blue.

Networking

Christopher is not a huge fan of social networking (don’t worry, I’m working on that one) and integrating many social media functions can do a disservice to someone that has neither the time nor the inclination to keep them updated.  But I persuaded him on the benefits of joining LinkedIn.  Working for a financial services company and having been on the tail end of some great job offers via LinkedIn myself, it’s a great way of putting yourself on the radar of recruitment consultants that are increasingly using LinkedIn as a source of talent.

Christopher is at Imperial College London.  Heavy on the sciences, many of its alumni go into the financial services sector, so adding a link in the footer flags this for anyone for whom this is important.

Design

When asked for his thoughts on a logo, Christopher’s only instruction was, “Just do something plain and simple.”  So I went for a simple type based logo header.  



Although I went through a few variations for his name, including my favourite, Helvetica Neu, I opted for News Gothic because it has a little more personality than Arial or Frutiger without being too self-conscious (yes, I do think fonts have personalities!).  The strapline – PhD Candidate 2012 – is Rockwell as a nod to all things collegiate and varsity.

Christopher’s main research interest is around the movement of the ocean and its affects on climate change. Although I had anticipated that the main colour on the site would be blue I was inspired by the blue-green colour in this photo that he took near Espegrend outside Bergen in Norway during summer school there this year.  It has a lot more energy than a plain navy or Facebook blue.




I added a blue-green active state to the buttons that appears when you click them, just to add a little more interest to the grey hover.

The overall design is fresh and clean.  I’m sure it will continue to be a work in progress for both of us.  When Christopher gets back I’m looking forward to creating a proper resume layout for his ‘About’ page.

The branding has been carried over to his business cards (thanks to moo.com for getting those out in time!).

In the last month I’ve received a number of emails from charities typified by the following:

• An email about a conference with an attached pdf conference programme and Word document booking form.
• An email from a young people’s charity asking me to vote for their organisation to receive funding from a statutory sector body. It contained instructions for the various steps on how to find their organisation from the voting website’s homepage.
• An email from an organisation wanting me to support a change in some government legislation with an eight page pdf attachment of background information.

The end of each of these emails asked me to forward the information to my network. I have yet to be able to conveniently do so.

On a daily basis, when I am talking to someone about any new subject, somewhere in the conversation they will say, “Forward me a link.” Now, an email is not the same as a link. An email, compared to a link, is big and clunky. An email with attachments is clunkier still, and relies on the recipient having the time, inclination and software to be able to open your attachment, read it, and forward it on. I once sent a 12 MB document (it was picture based) to 40 people in the same organisation and managed to crash their mail server.

In order to get a link, the information needs to be on a website. So I emailed each organisation back asking for a link. The organisation running the conference didn’t have a website. The young people’s charity had put it on their website but in such an obscure place that only the administrator could find it. The lobbying organisation was waiting on ‘the person that looks after our website to come back from leave’.

I’m not saying that you should abandon email altogether; after all, there are many Crackberry and iphone users amongst us that will flick through it on our long commutes, and there are many people that are not au fait with social networking tools. I’m just saying that, instead of preaching to the choir – as is often the case with email communication – you can reach out to a much wider audience, who can in turn reach out to their wider audiences, and so on, to get your message out there. And isn’t that the point?

So here are five tips to effectively sharing your information with minimal effort.

1. Consider getting a blog

Blogs don’t cost anything. The Women’s Resource Centre has a blog on Blogger. You can also get a free blog on Wordpress. Or your website package may come with a blog option that you haven’t yet discovered.

And before you say, “It doesn’t go with our branding,” or, “It looks free and unprofessional,” it is possible to skin it so that it looks like your website. I recently helped WRC out with their blog.

WRC's old blog design with one of Blogger's templates



WRC's updated design, skinned to fit their brand, but still on the Blogger platform

2. Get a news section on your website and train everyone (or at least a few different people) in your organisation on how to use it

When you’re putting out a new piece of news, people who have heard about it but don’t have any information will head straight to your website. If they can’t see a link on your homepage, the most obvious place for them to look will be your news section, so ensure it is clearly labelled.

Now I know your website has templates and that only one person in-house has responsibility to update it to ensure quality control, etc. etc. However, if you train everyone in-house to update only that section of the website i.e. they can’t touch anything else, you’ll share the workload, stop the incoming email and telephone requests for more information, and ensure that your information is linked to and shared faster and more accurately. And from past experience, an interesting by-product in having more people empowered to update the website is that more people in-house will be invested in your website as a working resource for your organisation.

3. Find out about the social networking tools that can help you spread your information

Think Twitter is just for the Stephen Frys (or should that be Fries?) of this world? Consider this tweet that went out yesterday from Twitter user @CathElliot to her 1,842 followers...

... that was re-tweeted by @whywomen (Women’s Resource Centre) to their 1,417 followers...

... that was re-tweeted by myself to my 460 followers...

... that was then re-tweeted by Twitter user @bjfletcherpi to their 522 followers.

That’s potentially 4,241 people in the space of around six hours that read that message (and more if you count all the people that re-tweeted after that); a healthy slice of that number are probably not involved in the women's sector or voluntary sector and so would have heard about this organisation and their campaign for the very first time.

From microblogging aps like Twitter to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon, all wrapped up with a healthy dose of RSS, there are a plethora of social networking and syndication tools out there to help you spread your information, and the best thing is, you don't have to use them all in order to start spreading your information.

To find out which ones would be the most helpful to you, select a group of people that would be the most useful in spreading your information and find out which channels they use.  They could be journalists, Government units or prominent voluntary sector organisations. As most people or organisations use the same user name (know as a ‘tag’ or ‘handle’) across all their social media channels, a quick search in Google should bring up their accounts. When you’re all set up, tell these people that you are now on Digg / Facebook / Twitter so that you can join each other’s networks, keep up to date with your news, and spread it accordingly.

4. Write a news release, article or blog post and send it to someone that will publish it online for you

It is generally always worthwhile building relationships with blog owners for future promotion of your service, organisation or campaign. Think about the websites and blogs of organisations that you read to keep you informed.

If you still can’t be persuaded to get your own blog or add a news section to your website, write out your information as if it were a blog post, news release or article, send it to someone that has a blog and ask them to publish it. You get your link to distribute and, by posting on their blog, you have the added value of reaching out to their readership.

Here’s a little secret: blog owners love relevant content. It saves them from having to come up with new content and still results in more traffic to their blog. However, they will not take too kindly to an eight page thesis with multiple bullets and clauses explaining the nitty gritty of a particular law, so keep in mind their readers while you’re preparing your article.

5.  Have a clear call to action to share your information

‘Please support us’ is all well and good, but specifying how people can support you is better. ‘Tweet this article’, ‘Email this article’ or ‘Share this article on Stumble/Digg/other social bookmarking site’ are all clear calls to action. You can add free buttons from Add This or Share This to your blog or website to make this easy.

People love sharing information – it’s in our nature to talk and communicate, and in this super networked age, aided by all the free tools out there, it’s quicker and easier to distribute over a wider geographic, demographic and sector spread. And a greater distribution means more people getting your message, more people that are informed and consequently more people that have the opportunity to respond to your call to action.