Opinion

Is the 29th IFC the first global fundraising conference powered by Twitter?

Fundraising | Jonathan Waddingham | 20 Oct 2009

Last year, I was lucky enough to go the International Fundraising Congress in Holland for the first time and learn from some seriously smart fundraisers. One of the things I enjoyed most was sharing what I learned, and discussing all the new ideas with a small group of charity sector people on Twitter. Who weren't actually at the conference.

 As it was only Howard Lake and I tweeting from the conference, this was considered newsworthy enough for Bryan Miller to blog! (I’m actually presenting with Bryan this year, and we'll be sharing case studies and research on the new breed of digital donors).

Fast forward 12 months, and how things have changed. Take a trip over to fundraising.co.uk and you’ll see a live feed of all tweets tagged with #29thIFC (the official hashtag for the conference) showing no end of people sharing what they’re learning.

Howard Lake has even taken the liberty to start a list of people tweeting from the IFC using TweepM, a website which allows you to follow groups of people in one go – handy for following a list of people who you may be interested in. (as an aside, he’s created some other useful lists of tweeters, including those specialising in fundraising ideas , charity PR and many more) He's also put together a dashboard to show all the interesting hashtag stats you never knew you needed to know!

If you are going to the IFC, there’s a new Twitter billboard that will show all the hashtagged tweets in real time, blurring the boundaries further between being at an event and taking part that much more.

Time was that if you couldn’t actually go to a conference, you wouldn’t know what happened there. Not any more – you can follow the hashtag stream online and get instant feedback about what people are presenting on – good for people who can’t be there, maybe not so good for the presenters…

 Earlier this year I wrote about tweeting at the IoF National Convention (not to bang on about it!) and how conferences are a great time to try out Twitter. So if you didn't listen to me then, maybe you will now...

 Still, I have questions: will this be the time that Twitter starts to get recognised by the sceptics who still think that it’s waste of time, or are a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon without really knowing what they’re doing?

Or is this the point at which Twitter starts to become more mainstream and accepted in the sector? Especially for, dare I say it, the more senior types?

Who knows, but either way, Twitter’s sure to be a hot topic this year.
 

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