Tuesday May 31st, 1pm
GCVS, The Albany Learning and Conference Centre
44 Ashley Street, Glasgow, G3 6DS

The Glasgow Third Sector Forum invites voluntary sector organisations, volunteering organisations and social enterprises to participate in an informative and engaging event that will;

• Outline the plans of the Glasgow Third Sector Forum for connecting the sector with information and resources

• Present the opportunities of engaging with cloud computing

• Discuss the pros and cons of using social media within the Third Sector to engage with existing clients and new customers - “Social media could boost the UK’s social enterprises by an average of  £212,000, according to research carried out by O2 and the RBS SE100 Index”.  Source - Social Enterprise Live

This event has been sponsored by the Glasgow Social Enterprise Partnership (GSEP) and is the first event to be organised by the Glasgow Third Sector Forum. 

The event is free of charge to Glasgow based Third Sector Organisations.   More information can be found in our flyer.

For more information and to book your place click here.
If you have any queries please contact CEiS Events on
0141 425 2923 or e-mail eventmanagement@ceis.org.uk

I'm presenting at the above event next week. I'll be doing a bit of social media myth-busting and, hopefully, attendees will create the world's quickest social media strategy.

To book a free place contact CEiS Events on 0141 425 2923 or e-mail eventmanagement@ceis.org.uk

If you've walked past the old Clydesdale Bank building in Glasgow's Merchant City recently you'll have noticed there's change afoot.

SCVO are launching a shared working space early next year - a really interesting development in Glasgow's third sector. Follow the link above for more info and costs.

The model is very different from that established by The Melting Pot, Edinburgh, so hopefully they two can co-exist and compliment each other.

I'd love to know what people think...is this the shared working space Glasgow has been waiting for?

 

I went along to last week’s #BeGoodBeSocial event at Edinburgh’s Melting Pot with a certain amount of apprehension. Since leaving the charity sector last year I’ve maintained a level of caution about getting too close to a world that occupied me, sometimes unhealthily, for over six years. I led Oxfam’s Digital Communications team (née Interactive Media) for four of those years, taking over the role shortly after Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0, YouTube was born, and at a time when Facebook’s main focus was college campuses rather than world domination. The scars I bear are for another post but it’s safe to say that there was a lot of flux, fuss and fallout over digital and social media during that period.

Attending #BeGoodBeSocial meant resurfacing questions that still reverberate in my head about how charities make appropriate use of digital tools, whether the often misplaced focus on numbers and media headlines had diminished any, and if those over-used words ‘engagement’ and ‘participation’ were really being embraced.

What a difference an evening makes.

Ross McCulloch (@thirdsectorlab) didn’t take nearly enough credit for creating an occasion that just worked. There was an informality that’s often missing at professional events; people turned up agenda-free to learn, to share, and to discuss, and that had a lot to do with how the evening was pitched in the weeks leading up to it.

Another masterstroke was in the choice of presenters - there can be a yawning sense of deja vu at events when person after person recounts their organisational ticklist of ‘things we’ve done’ but fails to give any additional context or insight. Here, however, were four very different, very compelling takes on being good and social:

• Martin Keane (@onekindmk) talked about the wide and varied techniques OneKind are using with social channels. It was excellent to hear a focus on reciprocity, a genuinely varied multi-channel strategy, and honesty about success measures - and (thank you!) another person daring to suggest Twitter might not be the direct route to audiences that some would have you believe.
• Steve Bridger (@stevebridger) offered a calm and considered guide to relationship-building that didn’t shy away from presenting tricky issues. There’s a real art to translating complex challenges into common-sense solutions, but Steve does so with aplomb and a very attractive slide deck. ‘Grow bigger ears’ was, for me, the phrase of the night.
• Snook (@wearesnook) were just a breath of fresh air. I missed their workshop but was given the elevator pitch version by Kirsty (@kirsty_joan): developing audience personas beyond the usual broad brushstrokes. Viva la revolution - not everyone uses Facebook the same way! Lauren (@redjotter), whose MacBook had sent the entire livestream into disarray, summarised what they do in a short and sweet presentation. Their people-centric and design-led approach to social change is inspiring.
• Rosie MacIntosh (who tweets from @oxfamscotland) finished things off with a presentation that would have given me a hernia in my previous role. But here are Oxfam Scotland facilitating a grassroots blogger network - allowing people to have a conversation about their shared values and interests - rather than storming in with a fixed agenda. Placing a value on engagement first and foremost is genuinely refreshing, and I loved the openness of it all.

So my outtake is one of positivity and very pleasant surprise: based on the evidence above there is not only some great work going on but also - more importantly - a sense of difficult questions being chewed over. Sitting in the pub afterwards (probably the oldest at the table, eek) it was really invigorating to hear people talking about all this stuff in a strategic, considered and experienced way. I want to slap myself for using the term ‘digital native’ but the gulf between those that actually *use* the tools as opposed to those who read a load of articles about why you should be using them is pretty massive.

Clearly the challenge remains in educating decision makers about what social media is and isn’t, and seeing beyond the more obvious headlines and trends. What I would observe - based on my own 18-month hiatus - is that events like this prove the debate is definitely going in the right direction.

 

#begoodbesocial – my take.

27 Oct

Not long back from the first meeting of #begoodbesocial at The Melting Pot in Edinburgh. If you work in the non-profit arena in Scotland and you haven’t already heard about this then get over to the website and have a gander.

There are a few meetups designed for the social media savvy in Scotland but the concentration lies mostly on harnessing social media for business success so it was really interesting to have a group of people talking about social media for good. Kudos to Ross McCulloch for pulling off a very successful evening.

From my perspective, as someone who is trying to introduce social media into an organisation that has not used it before it was comforting to hear that others face the same issues as myself. It was also satisfying to hear that those who are pushing the boundaries of social media within the non-profit sector in Scotland are doing so with similar aims to those I have for my organisation.

In particular it was great to hear Rosie McIntosh from Oxfam Scotland talk about citizenjournalists.org.uk a project launched by Oxfam Scotland to try and build a base of citizen journos that take social media beyond “clicktivism”. It’s an intriguing idea and I just love that there’s no media hype connected to it, just the true belief that we can all change the world one small step at a time.

Following Rosie’s presentation some good points were raised about branding (or lack of) of the site and the danger of other charities being able to “hijack” the site for their own causes. I wish I’d spoken up but I didn’t, I’m a relative newbie to this world afterall! What I wanted to say, as the conversation moved from cause hijacking to the constant competition for funding was this.

We all talk about the difficulty of introducing the doubters to social media, about the fact that we’re basically having to affect a culture shift within our organisations, we talk about telling them its about the people behind the Facebook, the human web. We talk about sharing information on Twitter, we Livestream events, we Slideshare ….. why then are we not taking this opportunity to extend that culture shift into the whole sector, to realise the true possibilities open to us, to really share, to work together?

Maybe I’m being naive but if we really all do go into work in the morning with the aim of changing our own small corner of the world just imagine what we can achieve with a powerful tool like the human web. If we’re all good and social together we can surely achieve so much more, and hey we’re already making huge cultural changes, why not just push it that little bit further?

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Tags: #begoodbesocial, edinburgh, meetup, melting pot, Non-profit, scotland

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• Categories Social Media
• Author moptopp

← The little things

A great post from Frank Barry on Mashable. The apps he mentions are all from US orgs. Anyone got a UK or international mobile app they'd like to share?