Jonathan Waddingham

Tag: conferences

  • Highlights from #iofnc 2013 – multi-channel, innovation, mobile

    I’ve been lucky enough to be at the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention (#iofnc) this week, learning from the best minds in the UK charity sector. It’s always a great opportunity to meet fundraising friends IRL, but there have been lots of great sessions too.

    If i had to try and summarise the key trends from the last three days (from the sessions I went to), they would be…

    • Multi-channel fundraising is a must. You can’t stick to one way of talking to people anymore.
    • Innovation is more important than ever, but you have to be prepared to fail to innovate. It’s all about testing,  learning and continually iterating (and will be more and more about lean startup methodology, I suspect)
    • Mobile is a necessity, not a luxury. It’s here now, not a future trend. It also helps you simplify your products and propositions. But it’s not necessarily the holy grail in itself (see trend #1)

    To try and be more organised this year, I’ve used storify to collect mine and others’ notes on the presentations I’ve attended, and these were my top 3 highlight sessions…

    • Innovation in giving with @reubenturner and @wordofjoe
    • Mobile and digital journey at UNICEF with @spirals
    • Dryathlon and click to cure with Cancer Research UK

    I’ve embedded the relevant storifys of each session for your delectation below…

    http://storify.com/jon_bedford/bits-and-bobs-from-the-iofnc-day-2-part-2

    http://storify.com/jon_bedford/bits-and-bobs-from-the-iofnc-day-1-part-2

    And Laila’s slides below:

    http://storify.com/jon_bedford/bits-and-bobs-from-the-iofnc-day-2-part-1

    I also shared plenty more notes from sessions on crowdfunding, shaking the digital tin, the opening plenary and online video, and more…

    This year I also had the pleasure of working with Merlin’s Danielle Atkinson and PayPal Giving Fund’s Nick Aldridge to put together the digital stream for the Convention, so if you do have any feedback on the digital sessions and would like more or less of certain things, drop me a line on twitter or email.

  • My year (of presentations) in numbers

    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.

    Facebook Developer Garage London. Jonathan Waddingham

    (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…