Training

Charities are about to find it harder to maintain their Gift Aid income. From 5 April 2011 the Transitional Tax Relief on donations by Gift Aid will come to an end.

It has been too long since my last blog and I have no excuses other than that things have been incredibly busy helping charities and community groups meet some very tough objectives - apologies to regular readers. This week I've been part of a team delivering marketing and communications workshops to non-marketing people and its been a hugely informative few days for me, let alone the delegates (who, incidentally agreed via their feedback sheets that they valued the sessions). We've run into some interesting issues working with groups from a mixture of business, charity and public sector backgrounds and I thought I'd be open and share some of our learning to see if it resonates with others. Having taken a quick straw poll amongst the team, and in pursuit of improvement, here are the things we will be thinking differently about for future workshops. It would be great to hear your thoughts too.

• In the words of Dr. Gregory House, people lie! No matter how many times it is covered in pre-workshop materials, if you ask people whether they know anything about marketing, they say yes. I expect it's because we don't want to feel daft amongst our peers and other groups but asking people to self-select workshops based on their own level of knowledge coming into the event does not guarantee a base-level of knowledge on which you can build.

Social media thinker, writer, practitioner and explainer Beth Kanter spoke this morning at The Guardian in London to a room full of charity sector people interested in how charities can use social med

I have just watched a 7-minute video on privacy and prospect research on YouTube, via LinkedIn. It is written from a US perspective, but has some useful tips about prospect research and ethics.

Yesterday, more than 300 delegates representing nearly 100 Scottish charities converged on the Hilton Glasgow for the 19th Institute of Fundraising (Scotland) Conference.

Here are some resources from the second day at the 30th International Fundraising Congress. You can also review the first day's collection.

Time to catch up on some of the information being shared at the 30th International Fundraising Congress in Holland.

Here is the Resource Alliance's promotional video for this year's event:

I was disappointed to find there isn't a Twitter screen at this year's International Fundraising Congress.

While there are over 900 fundraisers travelling to the 30th International Fundraising Congress in Holland, there are plenty more who aren't going or can't go.

This year's National Convention has once again proved a very valuable event for many fundraisers and those who work with them.