Tag: upyerbrum

Net2ThinkTank: It's the shopping season – so get your supporters shopping for your cause.

Britt Bravo at Netsquared has thrown out this question: How Can Nonprofits Use the Social Web During the “Giving Season”?

The truth is that this is the shopping season – so make the most of it with something that’s a touch web 1.5.

Sign up for an affiliate site and encourage your supporters to use it for some of their Christmas shopping. Over at the Birmingham Conservation Trust we opened this shop through buy.at. We chose it because it has a number of key high street brands which have a lot of public trust – which is important when you are thinking about how people may perceive your charity.

You can buy everything from a case of wine for Christmas through to the holiday you’ll need to recover afterwards, the clothes you’ll wear to the works Christmas party and even those utterly useless presents bought for uncles you barley know.

We don’t litter our website with affiliate links but simply encourage our networks to use it for their shopping. You can apply all of the tools of web 2.0 to encourage people to support you at no cost to themselves. Add it as an item on social networking sites, send the link to friends on facebook who share an interest with you or live in a neighbourhood relevant to the charity, perhaps even use it as a url when you leave comments on people’s blogs.

Be warned, it can be difficult to get people into the habit of using your affiliate site.

On www.buy.at/birminghamconservation we have one stationery trader, Euroffice, who offers 8% on just about all purchases. With deals like that why not talk to businesses you know and ask them to start consider routinely using the service to buy their office supplies.

Of course the more flexible your affiliate provider is the better for you.

I’ve got mixed feelings about perfiliate who runs buy.at.  You can’t create links to specific products or traders – which seems a little complacent on their part. For example the National Trust will pay us £20 for everyone who signs up to them through our buy.at shop. That’s a natural tie in. If we could email a link to that offer direct to our mailing list it could allow us to raise money quickly with minimal effort. But we can’t – the best we can hope for is that our supporters will wade through a series of links to. So any suggestions for a better affiliate welcome.

The Big Green Challenge Hits Birmingham – a new podcast on the Grassroots Channel

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NESTA was in Birmingham today to entice us into innovating. The Big Green Challenge is a two year climate change project with a £1 million pound prize at the end. Any community group (or similar) can win if they find a communal and repeatable way to cut CO2 emissions by 60%. Easy then!

There were queries/criticism at the launch (which you’ll hear in the podcast), some on the blog post of the media partner for the prize.

I approve of ideas with ambitious targets. Too often public life offers mediocrity born of easy targets.

As one Brummie told us (if anyone remembers who please tell me) at today’s regional launch it may well work best if people collaborate on ideas. Indeed I was wondering of the prize fund could have been split to reward a winner and reward those who collaborate to innovate – something on the lines of that audacious open source bid for the Third Sector Innovation Exchange.

Listen to our podcast at the bottom of this post, watch Sarah Beeny’s video, read the website, subscribe to their blog and let us know if you apply.

By the way I heard interesting ideas from Jerome Baddley of Nottingham Energy Enterprise – so hello Jerome. The prize is also on partnership with Unltd. Birmingham was the first launch, more dates in other cities throughout November.

B:cen launches Youtube Channel.

Three films which set out how diversity networks are supporting active citizens in Birmingham are the launch videos for the Youtube Channel for the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network. The diversity networks were the subject of quite a strong appeal from the Bishop of Birmingham – who argued on the Grassroots Channel that they should be supported, not allowed to wither.

B:cen (which has employed me on a freelance basis for a good three years) will lose all of it’s funding from November this year, and is now campaigning to try and persuade Birmingham City Council and the Birmingham Strategic Partnership to continue to support the networks (not b:cen as a body) established in neighbourhoods in the city and by groups of shared interest across the city.

Back to the videos, made by another local community film maker Rachel Smith with interviews by Paul Slatter. One is about the Podminions podcast channel which I share purely because I agree with everything they say (and vanity)…

but I think my favourite happens to be Mark on the Disability Network – ‘cos he’s always made compelling arguments for networks as a tool for strengthening communities…

If you want to keep tabs on more films as they are put up, go to the channel page and use the subscribe button to stay up to date.

Upyourend – getting your blogpost on a map of Brum or GEOTAGGING 2

Jon Bounds mentioned his new thingy upyourend on facebook which led me to ask the question how do you geotag a blog post? Jon’s given us this answer.

So decided to get started by geotagging my recent podcast on Clean Medina – the Jihad on Litter in Small Heath. Indeed geotagging is a potentially a powerful tool for neighbourhood news and local blogging. It should also help public bodies keep track on who is sayng what about which neighbourhoods.

I added Geo as a plugin for WordPress (this blog still runs on 1.5 – something Jon and I will probably change soon) which asks for the Longitude and Latitude – and then adds though to your RSS feed. Now how do you find this. It turns out that lat and Long on UK postcodes are protected as the intellectual property of the post office. Jon suggests using something called an API key (which made my head implode). I found that if you tag a location on a google map and then look for directions to that location the latitude and longitude turn up – see the top left hand side of this image of the location for my blog post.

In this case I’ve tagged the post upyerbrum – which should feed through onto upyerend, but if that wasn’t the case upyerend would need to look to your feed – so you need to email Jon and tell him where your bimringham based geotagged feed is.
So there you go. I presume this will soon appear on upyourend. Oh and er will the site allow us to filter by most recent? Yes i know – it’s just something you knocked up at 2am and can I back off with the questions and requests please. Thanks Jon.