Great turn-out at the Fundraising Ireland 2010 National Conference
Posted by Bryan on March 24, 2010
I’m just back home after a flying visit over to the Fundraising Ireland 2010 National Conference in Dublin, where I was presenting a session about online community fundraising – the slides from which are available to view above or via Slideshare.
The conference was a sell-out event and the sessions I got to, as well as my own, were characterised by some really great interaction and questions – which reflected the great atmosphere at the whole event. Add to that the best conference lunch I’ve had in ages and the whole thing was a great success. So, many congratulations to the organisers at Fundraising Ireland. They’re a pretty new network for Irish fundraisers, and just announced that they are about to re-vamp their website as an Irish fundraising information portal as well as introduce a membership scheme. Without a doubt, well worth getting involved with them if you’re a fundraiser in Ireland.
One of the topics that was returned to a couple of times in discussions was the lack of useful Ireland-specific research on everything from giving trends to online usage. To help-out with the latter, here are the links to the latest freely available Irish online usage research I’ve been able to find – and which I quoted from in my session:
> Latest report from ComReg (the Irish Commission for Communications Regulation) a bit of a heavy read but does include the latest data on internet access in Ireland – published just this month: download it for free here
> Amarach Research Irish Life Online Report from Feb 2009: downloadable here
> Barry Hand’s blog post on the top Irish websites for Feb 2010: read it here
> Information on facebook user numbers in any country around the world: Checkfacebook.com
If anyone comes across any other recent research into the Irish online market – especially if it relates to social media use – then do let me know.
Barry Hand said
Hi Bryan,
Thanks for the reference, hope you found some of it useful. I’ll have a look and see if there’s something a little more specific I can do on which websites to target for creating awareness of Fundraising.
If you’re looking for some facebook stats, Damien Mulley normally keeps a record here – http://mulley.ie/blog/2010/01/facebook-triples-in-size-in-ireland-in-2009/ but you can get up to date info by creating a new ad on FB and checking the targeting options for different demographic data.
Bryan said
Thanks Barry, there is a real lack of data available in relation to online fundraising in Ireland – so any data you can add specific to fundraising will be brilliant. Even just understanding the top charity websites by UVs would we a great starting point.
Paul Meade said
Hi Bryan,
My colleague, Deirdre Garvey, sent me a link to your blog post and so I took the liberty (hope you don’t mind!) of . I embedded the slides there too but provided link to both your blog and to the Strategy Refresh website.
In relation to the online fundraising data. I don’t know if you are familiar with Fundingpoint.ie – it’s one of The Wheel’s websites. Basically, it is a database of funding schemes for the Irish community and voluntary sector. It’s my job to stock and keep it locked and loaded with fresh data and deadlines. We have almost 700 schemes on there at present. However, I realise that that is not necessarily relevant to the type of online-specific fundraising data you want to accumulate (as the database side of the site is subscribers-only).
However, we do have a pretty extensive news section to the site and a fundraising guidance section. My experience is that people are indeed eager for such resources. I try to produce at least 10 fundraising news stories a month (not always easy!) with the number of readers varying from low hundreds per a story to almost three thousand on some of them. In other words, people are eager for online info and a does indeed appear to go (relatively) viral.
Cheers,
Paul
Bryan said
Hi Paul – no problem at all with you embedding the presentation on your site. Your news section looks like a very handy resource for fundraisers in Ireland.
Paul Meade said
Too bad my html tagging skills aren’t so sharp – I see I made a right dog’s dinner out of the links I tried to embed above!
Bryan said
Don’t worry – they still seem to link through fine;-)