New Venture

The campaign goes on apace, and I know that people from this forum have been checking out the website and signing the petition, so "Thank you"

You might like to know that we have 260 signatures so far - it may not sound a lot, but that ranks us at 377 out of 5469 petitions on the website, and we've only been up there for 10 days!

There's a meeting with the Council on Monday - cross your fingers for us, please :-)

Gerry Beldon FInstF
Director, 26-01 CIC
www.26-01.com

Following up on last night's post, I have just received notice that we have a Downing Street petition live, as of this morning.

Since this is a relatively new campaign tool, I'm really interested to see, firstly, if we can get people to sign up, and secondly, if it has any impact.

I'll try to keep the forum advised, of course, on how it goes, but if you want to have a look, it's here : http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/culturequarter/

Cheers

Gerry

Gerry Beldon FInstF
Director, 26-01 CIC
www.26-01.com

Thanks for that, Howard.

Usually when I've sought your help these issues have been under my direct control, and the problem has been my technical limitations! In this case, we have a tame techie, and I'll pass him your comments.

I've just been on holiday for a couple of weeks (hence the slow response), but the question of showing responses is one I want to raise tomorrow - we've had some very famous names associated with us, and e-mailing their support, but that is not reflected on the site yet.

Anyway, I do know that we've had visitors to our site from this forum, and some direct responses - thanks to you all; it is all helping, and we're meeting the Council again on 18th August - fingers crossed :-)

Cheers

Gerry

Gerry Beldon FInstF
Director, 26-01 CIC
www.26-01.com

Thanks Gerry. Although this site and forum started focusing on traditional charity fundraising, it certainly welcomes discussion of fundraising for social enterprises and the ever-widening array types of not-for-profit organisation.

Anyway, you've more than earned a little indulgence with your many contributions here ;)

My initial thoughts are:

* the website offers an opportunity to demonstrate how popular this initiative and ideas are. So, if you can attract large numbers to the site that could help support your fundraising bids. How to do that? I'd try to exploit the various social network tools to build up a following e.g.

twitter.com

facebook.com

youtube.com

I can't see any mention of or links to those on the site at present, although I see you've made a start with some blogs.

That said, I did spot a Flickr.com link - good stuff.

Also, can you get your website to publish a RSS feed that others can pull into their site and thereby give you a bigger audience?

Perhaps include some rating facility whereby visitors can vote on or rate a particular initiative/building etc.

You encourage other people/sites to link to you but I think you can make it clearer and easier by e.g. offering a graphic (with cut-and-paste HTML), or even a widget:

www.widgetbox.com/create/create_widget.jsp

* Can you add an email newsletter too and encourage people to register for it via the site?

* I think you could make it clearer what you want from people - again, perhaps with two or three graphics indicating "give us your ideas", "rate our ideas", "tell us what you want" or something like that.

* Pour encourager les autres, how about listing partner organisations, latest comments on blogs etc, and anything else that gives a sense to new visitors that the site is lively and active. (I know you and the site are new, but you need to start early with giving that sense of buzz about the project).

I've ended up giving you a quick website critique (with Web 2.0 tips thrown in) which might not be what you were asking for, but hope it's useful.

Good luck Gerry!

Howard