We had so much fun at the first Bright One Summer Party last year, that we’re going to throw another one!

This time it will be taking place at 6 St Chad’s Place (near King’s Cross) on Thursday 29th July from 6:30pm.

Whether you’re a volunteer, a client, an organisation looking for support, have been involved with us before or want to get involved, or if you want to support the work that Bright One does, then sign up now on the link below:

http://brightonesummerparty2010.eventbrite.com/

It will be a cash bar, so please bring along your pocket money.

Feel free to get in touch if you want any more details about Bright One or the party, but otherwise we’ll see you all then!

Lots of love,

- Ben & The Bright One Team

We’re delighted to announce that Bright One has been awarded the Social Enterprise Mark, which identifies us as an organisation trading for social purposes.

What’s even more exciting for us is that the Social Enterprise Mark is also a client, as we helped launch the Mark in February 2010 and have been working with them to develop their online presence and engage with social entrepreneurs through social media.

The Social Enterprise Mark is the brand for social enterprises, businesses that have a socially driven mission. Social enterprises are working to make a difference across the UK and beyond, but not enough people know what they are or how they work. The Social Enterprise Mark aims to raise awareness of what social enterprises do in order to get more people to buy from, engage with, start up and work for social enterprises.

You can find out more by watching the video below:

Ben Matthews, Founder of Bright One, said: “Bright One is absolutely committed to supporting charities, social enterprise and other third sector organisations in their communications activities, allowing them to raise awareness and much needed funds for their causes. We’re really proud to have been awarded the Social Enterprise Mark, which shows that we have created a sustainable organisation that makes a real impact to both volunteers and charities.”

Lucy Findlay champion from the Social Enterprise Mark Company, added: “We are delighted to award the prestigious Social Enterprise Mark to Bright One. Social enterprises come in all shapes and forms so it’s great to see a vital voluntary organisation understanding the importance of being part of the wider social enterprise brand.”

You can find out more about the Social Enterprise Mark at www.socialenterprisemark.org.uk.

We’ve had a great reaction since Bright One and CharityComms launched the CharityComms 2020 initiative a few weeks ago.

The presentation has had over 1600 views on Slideshare (not quite at 2020 views just yet!) and created plenty of buzz on Twitter with the hash tag #cc2020. It’s also been great to see people writing about CharityComms 2020. You can read reaction from PR Week, Brand Republic, Just Giving, School for Social Entrepreneurs, and the blogs of Steve Bridger, Darragh Doyle and Amy Sample Ward.

We’ve even received additional entries, bumping up the number of contributors in the presentation to 21. Thanks to Stuart Witts of Marie Curie Cancer Care, Rob Dyson of Whizz Kidz and Susan Farrington of the MS Society for their five predictions.

The updated presentation is embedded below:

Rob Dyson even recorded his five points in an Audioboo, which you can listen to here:

Thanks also go to the original contributors: Jonathan Waddingham from Just Giving; Steve Bridger; Vicki Browning, Director of CharityComms; John Carnell, Founder and CEO of Bullying UK;  Gail Scott-Spicer from The Scout Association;  Sue Fidler from Charity Email;  Gideon Burrows, Editor of ngo media; Adeela Warley, Head of Communications of Friends of the Earth; Lynda Thomas, Director of Externall Affairs for Macmillan Cancer Support;  Zoe Amar from Lasa; Julia Cream, Head of Communications for Timebank;
Jaz Cummins, Web and New Media Manager for Amnesty International UK, Amy Sample Ward;
Rachel Beer, Founding Partner of Beautiful World;  Victoria Rae, Head of Communications of UNICEF;
Jude Habib from Sound Delivery,  and Joe Saxton from nfpSynergy.

And a special thanks to Vicky Browning at CharityComms for agreeing to work with Bright One on the project in the first place!

We’re excited to announce that Bright One has recruited its first ever intern – Alisha Ramos.

Alisha is a third year student at Harvard University who has bravely crossed the pond and has joined Bright One. She will be based at Bold Creative, an award winning creative agency that Bright One works with, as a digital communications and PR intern.

“During my eight week internship, I’m hoping to gain an insightful and exciting experience in the world of digital media and public relations,” Alisha said. “At school, I study History and Sociology, but in my “free” time, I enjoy blogging, navigating through social media, graphic design, and generally poking around the internet. I’m looking forward to many adventures while exploring London, although it may take some time for me to look right instead of left when attempting to safely cross the street!”

While at Bold, Alisha will be working on two projects specifically. The first is called Tag Map, an interactive, geo-tagging networking site for sharing ideas and opinions. The second is a website called Forest Flava, which has been designed and developed by Bold in collaboration with young people from Waltham Forest. When she’s not working on these projects, Alisha will be turning her skills to Bright One projects.

You can also check out Alisha’s blog, Bows and Ivy, or follow her on Twitter – @alishalisha

Welcome aboard, Alisha, and best of luck with your internship!

Here at Bright One, we’re delighted to announce the launch of CharityComms 2020, a unique and intriguing snapshot of the most significant communications trends of the coming decade.

Participants were invited to write down the five trends they see as the most significant in the coming decade. These points are accompanied by an image that reflects their vision, giving a very personal view of what each contributor thinks lies ahead.

Charities represented in the initiative include Amnesty International, Macmillan Cancer Support, UNICEF, Friends of the Earth, The Scout Association, and many more. There’s also a host of influential thinkers in the charity comms space who have contributed, including Jonathan Waddingham at JustGiving, Rachel Beer at beautiful world, Steve Bridger and Amy Sample Ward.

Bright One has been working on the initiative in partnership with CharityComms, the professional body for charity communicators.

Ben Matthews, founder of Bright One said: “The combined vision of so many influential thinkers in the charity sector has produced a unique insight into the future of communications. We hope CharityComms 2020 will provide ideas and inspiration to enable charities to tackle the challenges of the coming decade with confidence.”

And you can take part!

You’re invited to add your own five trends and an accompanying image to the presentation by sending us an email and we’ll update as further submissions are received.

We hope you enjoy CharityComms 2020 and find it useful in helping to tackle the challenges of the coming decade. We’d love to hear what you think, so please leave your comments below.

What are your five trends you see affecting charity communications in the next 10 years?

This is a post about Bright One’s series of training sessions held exclusively for Bright One volunteers and clients. Please get in touch if you are interested in running a training session for Bright One. We’d love to hear from you!

Following last month’s inaugral Bright One training session on ‘Talkability’, a group of Bright One volunteers and clients were given an exclusive training session by Melanie Seasons, Social Media Strategist at Onlinefire, all about ‘Social Media and Online PR’.

During the session, Melanie described why Audience Mapping is important (Understanding who your target audiences are and what they ‘do’ online, as you need to know what platforms are best to engage on and if you already have advocates) and some of the tools you can use to find them. These tools included paid-for services such as Radian6, right down to free tools such as Google Blog Search, Addict-o-matic, IceRocket, and BlogPulse.

She also took the attendees through the basics of Social Media Relations, where organisation engagee with their audiences through Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook), Pro-active outreach (e-mail, newsletter, events) or Online press offices (blogging, video).

The attendees were also left with a few final thoughts to take away with them:

• Starting from scratch can be tough – establishing a social media profile does not happen overnight
• Expect growing pains – you’ll figure out as you monitor where your audiences are online
• Sign up to it all, but don’t expect to be able to do everything – concentrate on what works for you, and build a strategy from there

All in all, it was a fantastic session, so many thanks to Melanie for giving us a superb insight into Social Media!

This week, a group of Bright One volunteers were given an exclusive training session by Andrew Bloch, Founder and Managing Director of Frank PR, on “Talkability and the power of word of mouth.”

Talkability was described by Bloch as “the buzz that takes over and does the best marketing for a brand, product or service.”  Talkability is a registered trade mark of Frank PR and has its own proprietary methodology for helping generate ideas that will kick-start word of mouth, to often magnificent results as shown by well known campaigns for CompareTheMarket.com and Kit Kat.

The case studies that the volunteers were shown demonstrated how they can take this way of thinking into the charity work that they’re doing with Bright One, using Talkability to achieve cut through for clients and help them to make the most of limited resources through kick-starting word-of-mouth.

It really was a fantastic session, so a big thank you to Andrew and all at Frank PR for hosting Bright One’s volunteers!

We’re planning to do these training sessions on a regular basis, so please get in touch if you’d like to run a training session on an element of PR for Bright One.

Not long ago Bright One volunteer Keri Hudson signposted us to the Backing Young Britain campaign, and we’re pleased to announce our support for it.

Backing Young Britain is a cross-Government campaign calling on all organisations across the country to create more opportunities for young people. Times are tough for young people who are leaving school or full-time education. Yet they are the future of our workforce and it’s vital that they get the help they need now, to find a job, get training, or build their work skills and experience.

Supporting young people has always been central to our goals here at Bright One. When we set up, one of our aims was to help students of PR and media gain valuable work experience in providing PR support to organisations in the Third Sector, in the hope that this experience would aid them in their search for employment after university. To date we’ve had some fantastic students volunteer with Bright One who have worked alongside experienced PR and communications professionals to provide innovative support to a wide variety of Third Sector organisations and campaigns.

But don’t just take our word for it – PR student Alex Judd, a volunteer at Bright One, tells more about how Bright One has helped him:

“I would thoroughly recommend volunteering for Bright One to any student. The guys you’ll work with are incredibly helpful and will gladly answer any queries you might have. As you’re working for clients in the third sector, you also feel like you’re helping a worthwhile cause. Not to mention the great experience in PR, meaning if you’re looking for a placement year or seeking employment after you graduate there is no doubt that this experience will mean you’re one step ahead of the competition.”

Find out more about our volunteering opportunities here, check out the Bright One entry on the Backing Young Britain website and find out how you can support Backing Young Britain here.

This post was written by Ben Matthews, founder of Bright One, for the CharityComms askCHARITY blog, a blog with posts about charity communications from a host of experts. You can read the original post here.

Last week, Rupert Murdoch’s The Times followed in the path of the New York Times and announced that they were going to be launching a paywall for the online version of the paper, Times Online. Like other publications, such as the Financial Times, The Times have proposed a £1 per day charge, with £2 getting you a week’s access.

This move is being hotly debated in the media, and it is what many have described as an inevitable move in the face of falling advertising revenues and newspaper circulation. Other newspapers suffering from an equally dismal future are expected to make similar announcements, in an attempt to curtail the drop in revenue that has been a steady feature in recent years.

As communicators, we will need to pay for these subscriptions whether we like it or not. It is our job to keep up with the news and the publications that report it, with many agencies still sifting through the papers every day and reporting back the main stories of relevance, both internally to colleagues and externally to clients. Services such as Google Alerts and RSS Feeds have enabled us to keep up with the latest announcements in close to real time, but those services will soon be limited as articles of interest begin to be placed behind paywalls.

This move is likely to hit charities and social enterprises, who have barely enough resources to pay for proper comms support, harder than commercial companies. Of course, newspapers have to make money, but social enterprises and charities are not really equipped to absorb these new costs – and there is no word of any support if other publications follow suit and move behind paywalls.

The Newspaper Licensing Agency announced a similar move towards the end of last year, requiring organisations copying and distributing online content from publications to pay for the privilege. At least the NLA accommodates charities to an extent, as the licence is tailored to suit the specific copying needs of individual charities from “scanning, emailing of scanned content, receipt of hyperlinks from a licensed press cuttings or PR agency, and/or the sharing of links via a secure company intranet.”

It would be interesting to see if publications who put up paywalls offer similar discounted services to charities, and indeed even the NLA is far from perfect: licensed copies of digital content can only be accessed and stored for up to 28 days following publication, after which they must be deleted.

Will this mean people simply gravitate towards the free content of the Guardian’s popular site? Should we all write a letter to Murdoch asking for charities to be exempted? Or can we support each other by flagging up Times stories to our mates in other charities?

Although the full extent of the media’s move behind paywalls is yet to play out, it’s something that all charities and the communicators working in them should be aware of; and they should be planning to put aside extra resources to pay the price for paywalls (as difficult as it may be in current times).

What are your thoughts on paywalls, and how will it affect your charity’s communications activity?

Social Impact Camp is back! We are happy to announce the details of the next Social Impact Camp. A big thank you goes to the London Early Years Foundation for hosting the event..

• Date: Wednesday 14th April 2010
• Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
• Location:  London Early Years Foundation, 121 Marsham Street, Lonon SW1P 4LP (Google Map)

You can reserve your place by signing up on the Social Impact Camp wiki.

Social Impact Camp is a monthly meet up for people to discuss different ways of measuring social impact. We compare tactics, think of ways to improve it and wonder if there will ever be a standard set of metrics against which to judge success by. It’s a friendly place, we don’t try and sell to each other; instead we’re honest, pretty and will never wear name tags.

To get a feel for what has happened at past events, take a look at the fantastic blog posts by Rob Greenland of The Social Business and Max St John of Nixon McInnes.

We look forward to seeing you all there for some great conversations…and lots of tea and biscuits.