Archive - Sep 1998 - News Items

Are you a sole fundraiser working on your own?

UK Fundraising has been chosen as one of "The Top 10 Comprehensive Nonprofit Resource WebSites" by the Nonprofit Management Program at Arizona State University's Nonprofit Management Institute. Find out which other sites are in the top ten. The Institute has also published a list of foundations which accept grant applications online.

The German Charities Institute has launched an online questionnaire to find out what donors who are already online think about charities. The questionnaire asks if they would be willing to receive information from charities via e-mail and whether they would be prepared to donate online. Demographic data is also being gathered on participants. The results will be summarised on the site.

If you want your charity's Web site to get noticed, it would seem that you should negotiate some links with some of the more popular football sites. According to a Novell UK survey office workers in the UK spent more time viewing World Cup football Web sites than porn sites. Novell UK surveyed 1,016 workers.

The British Epilepsy Association says that it is getting an average of 28,000 "hits" per week, according to .net magazine. It is not clear if this figure is "hits" or page views. The latter measurement is of course the more meaningful.

Animal charity RSPCA has won this year's UK Web Award in the Best Non-Commercial Web site category. Runner up was the Cancer Research Campaign. Judges said that the RSPCA site was "clean but hiding a lot of content."

Here's an intriguing idea spotted on the editorial page of Third Sector magazine recently. "The Rowntree Foundation report into how the top 50 foundations select recipients for their grants makes bewildering reading. The rule is there are no rules. Some prefer letters, others application forms.

While 85% of UK companies have Internet access, 38% have not established a guidelines for use of the Internet by their charities. One can assume that the situation is similar in UK charities. How many charities have drawn up an acceptable use policy for their staff and volunteers' use of the Internet?

Jason Potts writes in this month's Professional Fundraising about the impact on the Internet of digital TV, and how fundraising charities should address this development. He sees three areas that larger charities should consider. First, digital TV might offer more opportunities for DRTV by targeting discrete audiences via the increased number of channels.

Fundraisers in Ireland might soon have an e-mail discussion list to help them share advice and information. The list has been proposed by Bruce Clark, Fundraising Manager at Amnesty International Ireland.