One of my biggest frustrations is that in the drive to "professionalise" our sector, the need to actually learn about fundraising is often ignored. Instead of focusing on what donors need from charities, too many fundraisers have adopted expensive and wholly unnecessary corporate style re-brands…

When I was child, we lived in a flat (that's an apartment or condo for my north American readers). Like any small boy, I wanted a pet. I'd have liked a dog or a cat, but the architectural restrictions we lived under meant this was…

Times are tough for fundraisers. Faced with the highly critical climate we are currently living through, it can be all too easy to forget that our profession is responsible for some of the most important work undertaken anywhere in the world today. Fundraisers don’t just…

When the IOF were looking for speakers for this year's convention, I suggested that I’d like to talk about what I saw was wrong with fundraising. I didn’t realise just how prescient my proposal would be. I don’t blog that much these days, but when…

On Monday, I shared some thoughts on social media, with a particular focus on Facebook and Twitter. My central point was that there are better routes to leverage the power of our social instinct than these two behemoths of the internet.

 Beate Sorum, of the…

There was a short but intriguing article in the Ad Nauseum column in Private Eye last week. It suggested that some unnamed ad agencies were trying to bury a Forrester report that demonstrated that both Facebook and Twitter were pretty poor at providing an engaging…

Sit in any discussion about how a charity can promote a campaign on social media and it won't be long before someone suggests asking Stephen Fry to tweet about it. Being very kind, intelligent and rather lovely, he is known to tweet on behalf of…

Back in 2011, former Pixar artist, Emma Coats tweeted a series of rules for great storytelling that she’d picked up from her colleagues. Dinolgnacio has now painstakingly superimposed all 22 over images from Pixar’s films as a means to remember them. They aren’t all directly…

Here's a great video produced for Red Nose Day in New Zealand. There is no real reason to share it other than it features Flight of the Conchords and, as a result, is rather amusing. But perhaps that should be reason enough. Outrage or pity…