Andi has joined Bright One following a year and a half at the Queen’s Nursing Institute, where she was responsible for the organisation’s strategic communications and managed a nationwide programme on homeless health.

“As a former volunteer with Bright One, I am incredibly excited to have been given the opportunity to lead the organisation in its next stage of its development” said Davids. “In a few short years, Bright One has firmly established itself, offering more than 10,000 volunteer hours of communications expertise valued at more than £1,500,000 in equivalent service fees to over 40 charitable organisations in the UK. I look forward to using my experience in strategic development and organizational management to foster the fantastic team of Bright One volunteers and to ensure even more charities can communicate as effectively as possible with increasingly scarce resources.”

Originally from California, Davids received a BA in Mass Communications from the University of California, Berkeley. Upon graduating, she led the marketing and communications departments at several Bay Area based organizations including Habitot Children’s Museum, Net Impact and About-Face. In 2004 she became a member of the Executive Board of Young Women Social Entrepreneurs San Francisco (YWSE-SF), where she was responsible for developing the nonprofit’s structure, strategy and communications. After completing her MA in Global Communications at the American University of Paris she acted as a consultant in Morocco and France for NGOs such as L’Union Fes and UNESCO. She is currently studying for a PhD in Media & Communications at Goldsmiths University, where she is researching charity communications, and lectures at UAL’s London College of Communications.

Andi succeeds founder Ben Matthews, who said of the appointment, “Bright One has grown to become a recognized organisation in an environment where its services are increasingly in demand. I have every confidence the new team of experienced individuals – with Andi Davids at the helm – will have all they need to continue and expand upon the organisation’s success.

Elaine Callighen, Chairman of the Board of Bright One, stated “I am delighted to welcome Andi to the team and feel confident her energy, enthusiasm, and experience will prove invaluable to the development of Bright One. The whole Board looks forward to supporting her.”

A mobile app is never going to completely replace traditional methods when it comes to fundraising for charities. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s a form of revenue that should be ignored. With the economy the way it is in the UK at present, many charities are reporting a drop in donations. The impact the recession has had over the last couple of years has been substantial and any charity that seriously wants to increase donations should be looking to maximise on any form of revenue that it can.

Add to this the rise in mobile phone users over the last decade, with many people turning to apps to assist with a range of things and what you have is another resource that can utilise in a bid to improve donations. With this in mind we have put together a list of reasons your charity should consider using an app.

• Most people own a phone: The first thing to remember is that a huge percentage of the world’s population currently use smartphones such as the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S3. Apps are currently on the up with well over a million being offered by iOS and Android alone, making their popularity is clear.
• Freedom to donate if and when you choose: The fact is many of us don’t want to be approached by charities canvassing in the street. Often we’re shopping, working or at lunch and our tight schedule doesn’t allow the time. Moreover, there is nothing worse than feeling pressured into giving money. This means that many people will just say no on principle.
• Follow a charity: By downloading an app, users can follow the progress a charity is making, by seeing a charity doing good work people can then feel inclined to donate when they feel like it. For example, the WWF app gives users the chance to watch videos, get the latest news on their good works and upcoming events. Help the user feel a much more important part of the cause, and they’re more likely to want to get involved financially of by offering their time for free.
• Cost saving: It costs money to put people on the street canvassing and while designing an app will cost as well, money will be saved over the long term. People are often spending more time using their mobile phone than wandering the high street, so it makes sense to give them the opportunity to see what you are doing this way.
• Another outlet: Not everyone can be met through canvassing, those that are housebound as well as those who’s busy work schedules don’t allow for shopping during normal working hours make up a large percentage of the population. If you are going to reach as many people as possible, then the app world can help.

Using mobile apps doesn’t necessarily mean you have to design your own. Apps such as Charity Finder or the Extraordinaries help users browse apps to see a range of charities they can donate to or volunteer with. By simply going to a website, you too can register your charity and before you know it you will be an important part of the app world.

This guest blog was written by Kerry Butters on behalf of Broadband Genie, the consumer advice site for smartphones and broadband.

 Macmillan was handing out coal to help keep cancer patients warm a hundred years ago. Today they hand out grants, benefits advice and campaign on fuel poverty issues. Over the decades they’ve had to use new ideas to keep the campaigns interesting and Infi-Knit is one way they’ve done it. Working with LBi London, they created a real world knitting machine powered by social media and the web to knit a giant scarf to hand in to the government in place of a petition. While media opportunities and public interest in the Warm Home Discount Scheme might have been limited, a 127.32 meter long scarf was able to grab people’s attention and highlight the struggle cancer patients face.

Which? have been using social sharing and partnering with other organisations to pool support on a campaign. To campaign for a #bigchange in the financial sector they used emails and campaign material that encouraged people to tweet and forward to friends, and worked with 38 Degrees who have a complementary audience base to try and reach as many people as possible. By using social methods they are close to reaching their 100,000 signature goal.

The WWF pulled out all the stops for their campaign to protect the last 130 western gray whales. Targeted print materials were delivered to a tight group of stakeholders, a massive whale statue was floated down the Thames as a PR stunt, but partnering with a celebrity was what I thought was a great way to reach a new audience. Finding someone with a larger social media audience than yours and who is willing to thoroughly engage with them on a cause is a great way to reach people you wouldn’t have normally had access to.

There will be plenty more coming from today’s conference. Twenty sessions are happening throughout the day and you can follow along on Twitter at #ENCC2012.

The Google Grant scheme is an in-kind donation programme that gives selected charities advertising spend on their Google Adwords advertising platform.  It’s proving very useful to charities so whether you’ve heard about it or not, here’s what it’s all about and how you can start using it to help your charity.

How the Google Grant scheme works

At first Google offer a budget of $10,000 per month which equates to about £6,000.  If you then show that you consistently make use of that budget, they can offer up to $40,000 per month, roughly £25,000.

Your charity will need to be registered and have a website with no revenue generating advertising.  The application process can take up to 6 weeks, but having managed many Google Grant accounts, we have 100% success rate and have had them completed in 48 hours!

Google Adwords and PPC advertising

You’ve probably noticed ads on Google.  This type of advertising is called “pay-per-click” or PPC.

Normally, you pay an amount set by you when someone clicks on your ad, hence “pay-per-click”.  With the Google Grant in place, they limit you to $1 (60p) per click, but of course you don’t pay this.

Who the ads display for is controlled by you by assigning “keywords” to each ad.  So if you have a charity which supports families looking to adopt a child in London, you might add “child adoption in london” as a keyword.  You can also control where and when your ads appear.

How it can help your charity

PPC advertising is one of the most efficient ways of advertising these days.  When before could you inform people about your cause who are specifically searching for it?

We’ve found it’s had a very positive impact on our client’s website traffic, cause awareness and most importantly increased donations, which isn’t bad for something that’s free.

Managing your Google Grant account

An important part of the process is keyword research and using Google’s Keyword Tool you can find out how competitive the keywords you want to use are and how that affects the cost-per-click (CPC).

In our adoption example, keywords like “adoption agency” and “best adoption agencies” are more competitive than “how to adopt in london” or “adopting a child uk”, therefore they are more expensive.

Because of the $1 CPC per keyword limit, you should make sure you aren’t assigning keywords that cost over $1 to your campaign otherwise your ad won’t be displayed to anyone.

When writing your ad copy, include your keywords where you can because if a user then searches using those keywords, they will be in bold within the ad.  Evidence suggests this improves click-through-rate (CTR).

Of course, this work can be tricky for some, time consuming for others so that’s where getting in a specialists who manages Google Grant accounts professionally can be really useful.

Supporting your Google Grant with a paid account

In our experience, 90% of keywords fall within the $1 limit, however, there will be a small amount of keywords that are too costly so we recommend running a paid Adwords account alongside the grant to capture that audience.

Special offer for Bright One readers!

We’d like to offer our advice and guidance to the Bright One audience as we think it’s such a great cause.  Just mention this blog post and we will process your charity’s Google Grant application for free!

This guest blog was written by Mike Grindy who runs Passion Digital Marketing London and has worked in digital marketing for charities for over 8 years. Mike and his team manage Google Grant accounts for QUIT, TACT and Charities Aid Foundation.

These days it is almost expected that larger businesses will support the work of a charity, whether by choosing a charity to sponsor for the year, or getting involved with the community at a grassroots level. Corporate Social Responsibility is old hat, but smaller and smaller companies are answering the call for charitable activity – especially needed in times when cash is tight.

Small businesses can create charity partnerships by…

• Adding an optional donation with purchases made online

Yellow Moon, an online craft supplies store, allows customers to choose an organisation which will benefit from its purchases; items are tagged according to what percentage of the cost will be returned to that organisation. It’s a hassle-free, feel-good option for customers, and a great USP for the company.

• Starting a new charity

i-studentgroup, a small digital company specialising in marketing international education, this year began a charity called Rhinocrocadillipig with the aim of fundraising on behalf of educational charities. Customers of i-studentgroup can add an optional donation to Rhinocrocadillipig in transactions, and CEO Paul Loftus is taking on personal challenges such as climbing Mt Kilimanjaro for fundraising.

• Getting employees to engage in a group fundraiser

A marathon, a bake-off, helping out at the local animal shelter… Team building activities build great teams. Camaraderie and a sense of achievement is an invaluable benefit for any company.

• Offering resources and time

Money isn’t the only thing that benefits charities. Businesses can offer pro bono work to a charity – such as designing a new logo or website, giving a social media tutorial, printing pamphlets or writing and distributing a press release.

The halo of charity work extends beyond raising funds for good causes. Here are some additional benefits to creating charity partnerships through business:

Engagement in the community

• Press coverage – there’s nothing like free promotion. Make sure you let local news outlets know of any events or fundraising activities by submitting a press release and photographs.
• Case studies – providing free of charge work can always go to support a portfolio of your company’s work, and assists in winning new business.
• Support within the workplace – choosing a charity to support can be a very personal choice, and can be reflective of employees’ personal lives.

Does your company do charity work? What form does it take? How does it benefit the business as well as the charity?

This guest post was written by Vivienne Egan, a social media and content PR who’s biggest Twitter achievement is being retweeted by Eddie Izzard. She is interested in social business, microeconomics, innovative entrepreneurship and musical theatre. You can follow her @VivEgan41

We’ve all witnessed first-hand the rapid growth of digital technology in every day life, even as recently as in the last 12 months. From social media, to cloud computing, to smart phones (it has been estimated that smart phones will be owned by over 90% of mobile users within the next two years), digital cannot help but have an impact on the charity sector.  And it’s becoming apparent that we need to take advantage of the spectrum of opportunities at our finger tips.

According to the second annual Social Charity Index, the top 100 social charities in theUK have free access to over 12 million connected people via social media. That’s a whopping 3.7 million Twitter followers between them, and more than a million supporters on Google+.  Clearly, social media, amongst other digital technologies, is a powerful resource. The results also show that charities who take advantage of social media are more likely to be successful, because their stakeholders feel more involved with the inner workings of the organisation.

We are already seeing charities explore innovative new ways to reach stakeholders through digital. For example, the conservation charity WWF developed a smartphone app to get Londoners interested in their local environment by allowing them to see facts, quizzes and videos on their phones at 10 locations around the city. The trend for using digital creatively is clearly off to a great start.

And yet, while it’s all looking quite optimistic, there are still many reports that charities are concerned that they may be missing out on the benefits that digital has to offer them.

We at Lasa were hoping to measure just how the charity sector is interacting with digital through the launch of our Charity Digital Survey. We’ve had great response so far, but we want to hear from as many people as possible, whether they work for a charity or offer services to the sector, like Bright One’s volunteers. The results have been fascinating, and we can’t wait to launch them at our upcoming Charity Digital Summit on Monday 12 November. The event will be hosted by Mayer Brown LLP in centralLondon, and brings together expert speakers, covering a broad range of digital topics to provide an integrated look at how charities can harness the power of digital.

There are still a few days left to offer your thoughts on the topic, so if you’d like to tell us how your organisation is relating with digital, then please take this survey. The survey will close at midnight on Sunday 30 September, so make sure you give us your thoughts before then!

This guest post was written by Sarah who graduated from the University of Warwick this summer and is aiming to begin her communications career in the charity sector. She is currently working as a Marketing and PR intern at Lasa. She tweets from @sarahwil40

We’ve come along way since Bright One started in September 2008.

Bright One has made great progress, from a small group of people who wanted to change the world for the better in their own small way using the skills they have, to a strong and growing community of volunteers who are making real social impact.

Run 100% by a vibrant volunteer community, Bright One has completed over 50 projects,committed over 10,000 hours of volunteers hours worth over £1.5 million in equivalent service fees.

Bright Works – our task-based volunteering platform that gives causes an easy way to connect with skilled volunteers – has added to this social impact. Bright Works lets third sector organisations connect with a pool of communications volunteers for small,one-off projects through microvolunteering. Since July 2011 it has involved over 100 projects and 400 volunteers to date, and really add to the sustainability and scalability of the work that Bright One does.

By the time September 2012 comes around, I will have been running Bright One for 4 years and this feels like a great milestone for someone else to take over from me and drive Bright One forward for the next period. I want to see this progress continue and now is the time for someone else to lead the community, so I’ll be making way for the next era of Bright One’s growth.

I believe that to build a truly great and sustainable organisation that Bright One needs to grow beyond its founder and I have every confidence in the board of trustees (Elaine, Ian, Laura, Alex, Freddie and Dan), the other members of the management team who make up Bright One and our volunteers, that this will happen to great success.

It’s been a pleasure running the organisation for the past four years and I look forward to its continued success. I’ve made some fantastic friends and learnt so much, so I thank you for the opportunity to work alongside the fantastic clients who believed in us and the volunteers who put in so much towards our shared vision.

As such, Bright One is looking for a new Chief Executive, an enthusiastic leader with energy and passion for innovative and creative solutions to helping charities and non-profits have access to a vibrant community of communications professionals.

The full role description is available here. Please do pass it on to anyone that might be interested in the role.

If you or someone you know are interested in applying for Bright One or have further questions about the role, please email your CV and Cover Letter to Tove Nordstrom at info@brightone.org.uk before 4 September 2012.

I encourage you to apply – it really is an amazing organisation and a fantastic opportunity for the right person (I should know!)

And if you want to keep in touch, you can reach me here.

Here’s the next era of Bright One!

- Ben Matthews, founder, Bright One

Before we noticed the full potential of the internet as an efficient method to conduct fundraising, not many people would’ve thought about how much online fundraising would eventually affect offline fundraising.

Since everything that you do online should be equal to what you do offline it is important to integrate both worlds to properly display the fundraiser’s cause. If they aren’t aligned, then supporters will become confused or distant, ultimately causing the fundraising to fall short of any goals set. For instance, having a website that says one thing and does another offline won’t work well with potential and current donors. Utilising both offline and online fundraising methods and how they affect each other is important since each have their own benefits.

Online Fundraising Advantages

The advantages of online fundraising are obviously clear, which is why it’s a route many have taken with the rise of the internet. With the expansion of social media and sites like JustGiving, many fundraisers are able to communicate their cause to thousands of supporters. Almost all charities now have Facebook and Twitter pages which are regularly updated with their latest campaigns and what progress is being made. This daily access allows fundraisers the opportunity to show supporters where their money is actually going and the positive effects through photos and videos.

Showing the connection between donation and effect has always been a difficult but important task for fundraisers, and with regular access to supporters through social media channels, this task has never been easier.

Offline Fundraising Advantages

Although it may seem that online fundraising is the way to go, offline fundraising still has its benefits, which is why it’s still such a popular method today.

You may have seen people at a busy intersection handing out flyers, wearing informative t-shirts and holding containers out for cash or the cheerleading team that holds weekly car washes for uniforms. No matter what technology is out there, interactive fundraising will always be around as a proven method to attracting donors.

With offline fundraising you’re able to explain your cause face to face with a potential donor and have an emotional impact and increase your results. Along with explaining your cause face to face, you can also quickly answer any questions that might arise when reaching out to a donor.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of offline fundraising is that your donors will actually feel as if they know who you are. Even with mediums such as YouTube, nothing will come close to actually spending some time with the person you expect to donate their hard earned money.

Taking Advantage of Online & Offline Methods

Online and offline fundraising utilise different tools but they both aim to do the same thing. Although, fundraisers will be focused on maximising the potential of online activities, organisations will still want to engage in offline fundraising. Having a physical presence in the form of fundraisers in city centres will help to enforce the image of the charity and show that they are active to supporters. In addition, there is very little that can replace the personal touch of coming face to face with a fundraiser who’s passionate about their cause and who is willing to stand outside for hours, come rain or shine.

This guest post was written by Alison who has worked in the fundraising industry for several years and enjoys discovering new fundraising ideas for charities. She currently works for Easy Fundraising.

 
The Bright One Socials are our way of bringing the community together over a few drinks. It’s a great chance to put a face to the name, meet fellow volunteers and to get to know each other a bit better.

This August Social will be a very special one as it will be Bright One’s Summer Social, which is always a lively one. There will also be a chance to catch up with our new and brilliant Bright One Trustees and get all the latest Bright One news and updates on upcoming projects.

Please, do come along and join us on Wednesday 29 August 2012, upstairs at The Crown Tavern, Clerkenwell, 6:30pm for what promises to be a fantastic evening!
 

The Crown Tavern 43 Clerkenwell Green, Clerkenwell,London,EC1R 0EG

Nearest tube: Farringdon

Check out our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter for any updates and it’d be great if you could let us know if you’re coming (or you could just show up on the day!)

Hope to see you there!

The Bright One Team

We’re rather pleased with our Bright One website. Launched back in 2009, it’s served well as the face our organisation and allowed us to communicate with a wide range of people – from new volunteers to the wider industry and beyond.

But after 3 years it’s looking a little worn around the edges and it could do with a little TLC to keep it looking fresh and up-to-date.

That’s why we are looking for a dynamic, self-motivated individual with experience and skills in web content management, writing and editing for the web, graphic design and site management to become our new web manager.

The web manager will be responsible developing the voice for all aspects of Bright One’’s online presence. In addition to writing, editing, and proofreading site content, you will work closely with the wider team to maintain site standards.

The web manager will also be responsible for crafting site promotions, email newsletters, and for helping with the project development of our award-winning microvolunteering app – Bright Works.

Responsibilities

• Create, develop and manage content for Bright One’s web presence (requires working with WordPress)
• Maintain a consistent look and feel throughout all web properties
• Maintain and develop the master content calendar for all web properties
• Copyedit and proofread all web content
• Track and report on all site metrics
• Work cooperatively with key team members, clients and volunteers

Required Skills:

• Exceptional communication and organisational skills
• Knowledge of HTML and experience with a rather popular Content Management System (WordPress)
• Ability to manage multiple projects
• Basic image editing skills
• Passion, Integrity and Energy for Bright One and the causes we support!

Next Steps

To apply for the position of Web Manager for Bright One, please send a CV and covering email stating why you’re the right person for the role to ben@brightone.org.uk and dan.howe@brightone.org.uk.
 
We look forward to hearing from you!