Charities are to compete in a timed battle to create a cause-related marketing campaign next month in an effort to win the Marketing for Good Award 2007. At a daylong conference to be held in London on 28 February, six charities including The Princes Trust, RNIB and Help the Aged will work from a brief to pitch their campaign ideas to an audience of delegates from the charity and corporate marketing sector. A panel of industry experts and a vote from the floor will choose the winner.

Charities should spend their online budget on improving their direct debit conversion rates instead of buying banner ads, fundraisers at the latest Analysis in Fundraising Special Interest Group heard.

One-year funding may soon be a thing of the past after Gordon Brown announced in his pre-budget report that three-year funding by the government should become the norm for the third sector.

The new licensing regime for face-toface and door-to-door fundraising passed in the Charities Act will not come in to force until 2009, according to the implementation timetable published by the Office of the Third Sector (OTS).