Jonathan Waddingham

I’ve not blogged much here in 2010, or even on the JG blog much since I moved jobs. And the reason is that the time I’d normally spend blogging, I’ve spent writing presentations – an awful lot of them. So it’s been interesting (to me at least, as a numbers person) to check my calendar and see how many talks and slides I’ve presented this year – to be honest, I’m quite proud of how much I’ve done. And interestingly enough, Seth Godin’s latest post is about writing about what you shipped this year, so it seems like I’m in decent company in looking back and sharing.

In 2010 I’ve spoken at 25 events or conferences as a speaker or panellist, presenting a total of 744 powerpoint slides to around 1,800 people. The 14 slidedecks I’ve shared on slideshare have had more than 16,500 views (20,000 if I include some fundraising tips I pulled together for our community team). In that time, I’ve also written 29 blog posts for JG, although only a couple for my Fundraising blog, which appears to have been the main casualty of all that speaking.

(here’s me seemingly trying to eat a microphone at the Facebook developer garage in October – it appears to be the “best” photo of me speaking this year)

Looking back at those numbers, it seems like one event every other week is quite a lot for someone who has a day-to-day job too and isn’t a professional speaker.  Still, I do really enjoy presenting and those interesting conversations you have with people at conferences during the breaks, so it doesn’t feel too much like work at all. Even when I do a lot of the work in my own time, I do love getting up and talking about things I’m passionate about (and I’m very bad at saying no too).

Incidentally, the most popular (by numbers) presentation I gave this year was at the IoF National Convention in July: Discover the secrets of online fundraisers.

As for enjoyment, probably the most fun speaking gig I did in 2010 was MC-ing the first ever JustGiving awards – it was an amazing night filled with meeting inspirational people and hearing the most heart-warming stories – I’m already looking forward to MC-ing it again next year.

But aside from the JG awards, I will be speaking at as few conferences as possible next year to give myself (and the charity conference circuit) a rest from my dodgy puns and endless ‘amusingly’ captioned flickr photos. Unless, of course, you need anyone to talk about a certain fundraising website’s new set of APIs…