At the moment, there aren’t nearly enough younger people going into charity trusteeship in this country. I’m going to try to convince you that it is something that you should consider.

Firstly, anyone can be a Trustee. You don’t ever have to have worked for a charity in any capacity, in fact in some ways you might be even more in demand if you haven’t because it is likely that you will bring a different set of skills for the role. Trustees are needed who have skills in such areas as finance, fundraising, PR, law and much more.

Secondly, you will be making a real difference. Trustees help to make sure that charities fulfil their charitable objectives- ie. what they were founded for. They keep charities fresh and full of new ideas and help them to reach out to the people who most need them.

Thirdly, it will teach you so much. Via my own experiences as a Trustee I have been involved with things as diverse as poring over architectural plans, representing the charity at the live screening of Children in Need and helping to set the pay levels of senior staff. You will have the opportunity to understand an organisation from top to bottom. Being a Trustee will be a great addition to your CV and will show employers that you are prepared to show real commitment to a cause that you believe in.

It shouldn’t be too hard to find a cause you do care about as there are thousands upon thousands of charities covering every area of interest imaginable. The chance of you finding something that you are attracted to is high and even if you have to travel a little the charity should be able to help you with expenses. It’s worth bearing in mind that some charities are very small and don’t have the time or resources to be very proactive in their recruitment. If there is a charity that you would like to be a Trustee for, just ask them. If they don’t have any positions they will at least have you in mind for the future.

Have a look around on the web and please think about applying to be a Trustee. Good Luck!

This guest post was written by Alex Swallow, founder of Young Charity Trustees. You can connect with them on Twitter @YoungTrustees or via their LinkedIn group where they post news, discussions and interesting trustee opportunities. If you think trusteeship could be something for you and would like to give it a try, we’ve got some roles going here at Bright One.

The High Tea Cast is an irreverent, savvy, monthly podcast combines music and popular culture chat, and great interviews with cool young leaders in fashion, food and third sector projects.

This month, Co-creators Sam Sparrow and Leanne Rice take a look at some worthy community ventures in 2012, finding ways their skills can help others and do some good.

We’re delighted that they picked out Bright Works and had some lovely things to say about the platform. Listen for yourself:

Thanks for the great feedback, ladies!

You can listen to the podcast at The High Tea Cast here or  subscribe via iTunes.

Oh, and you can find out more about Bright Works here.

This is why ChairtyComms, the membership body for charity communicators, yesterday began a campaign to exempt charities from copyright licensing fees. This campaign is backed by NSPCC, Cancer Research UK, British Heart Foundation and us here at Bright One.

We’re supporting this campaign because times are tight for all charities and. I know of at least one large charity press office which was having to cut back on weekend newspapers and some of the more expensive broadsheets at the same time as having to pay their NLA fees.

This makes little sense for the NLA which is owned by eight publishers of national newspapers, including News International and the Guardian Media Group. In the example above the charity’s NLA license was not huge so by cutting back on the broadsheets published by the NLA’s owners they were seeing the amount of money from this customer fall.

The NLA pricing structure for charities, which was agreed in 2003 with the NCVO, does give charities a discount and personally when I’ve dealt with the NLA they’ve been very helpful and understanding. The problem is what was mentioned above: 90% of the coverage charities monitor is of themselves, they’re not using it for commercial gain and have often played a big part in writing any piece. The current system misunderstands the way charity communicators work and treats them like their commercial (and profit-making) colleagues.

For those interested in the campaign see charitycomms.org.uk/charity_media_licensing and Vicky Browning, CharityComms Director, explains their position very well in this Guardian Voluntary Sector blog guardian.co.uk/media-licensing-charities-exempt. For anyone worried about your own licensing CharityComms has put together a great guide charitycomms.org.uk/guidelines/charity_media_licensing.

We started the year off with a slew of updates to Bright Works, our microvolunteering platform that lets causes connect with skilled volunteers in a now even simpler, effective and easy way. Now that the site is working better than ever, new projects have been added. If your New Year’s resolution was to give more back, here’s some great opportunities to start:

Small Charities Coalition and Charities Trustee Network’s ambition is to provide practical and applicable help to both the operations and governance of small charities. On Bright Works, they are looking for help revamping their website by adding photos, case studies and quotes from attendees. Do you have experience with CMS Typo3 and a few hours spare? Get in touch.

A1 Positive Recycling is an Exeter-based not-for-profit social enterprise that aims to establish an alternative technology education centre for the South West to train adults with learning difficulties. They are looking to build up a positive management team to help lead the organisation through the next stage in its development. Find out if you have what it takes.

Young Professionals in Human Rights is a network to share resources and experiences and promote innovation within the field of human rights. The group is looking for talented and innovative volunteer communications and web managers to help take their online presence to the next level. Could this be you?

The Lord’s Taverners is one of the UK’s leading youth cricket and disability sports charities. They are looking for help with several facets of a direct mail campaign. Do you have expertise you can share in this area?

These, and a dozen other projects, are currently active on Bright Works. If you haven’t already, sign up and see if there are any tasks you can help out with.

Happy New Year to you all ;)

To kick things off in 2012, we’ve got some new updates to Bright Works, our microvolunteering platform that lets causes connect with skilled volunteers in a simple, effective and easy way.

Here’s the run down:

Slippy Tank

We’ve upgraded the platform so that we can now have projects that run outside of the main screen. This is rather affectionately known as a “slippy tank”.

Think of it like Google Maps, except you can locate projects on the site by clicking on these pink markers:

So if you need to find a project that interests you, simply navigate using the pink dots and you’ll find something that suits your skills and passions.

We’re aware that this makes finding individual projects tricky, but remember that each project has it’s own unique url, so note that down if you find something you like. We’re also working on search and bookmarking functionality, so keep an eye out for them in the near future.

Submit Projects

Now that we’ve got the slippy tank, we can publish more projects!

Up to now, we were only sourcing project for Bright Works from Bright One’s curent client base. This was so that we could test the platform, work through any bugs or kinks in the process that we found, and ensure that the whole experience was right for both charities and volunteers.

There’s still lots more things we’d like to do, but now we’re delighted to be accepting applications from charities from across the world.

It’s easy to get started, just fill in this application form.

Hide the Dashboard

The Dashboard on the right hand side of the page is your key to all the useful things happening around Bright Works – tasks that you’ve taken on, tasks that have been verified, tasks you’ve completed, and other useful alerts.

But while you’re scrolling around for tasks and projets you can help out on, you might well want to hide the dashboard. Simply click on the “hide dashboard” link at the bottom of the page and it will roll up to the top so you have the whole page to look at.

Check out that view!

New Tour Video

Thanks to our rather wonderful friends Sam and Louise, we’ve got a video tour on the site that quickly and easily explains how Bright Works, er, works. What do you think?

Other Updates

There’s been a few other tweaks behind the scenes, including an upgrade to the software that Bright Works is built on and some slight tweaks to the help and FAQs, but we won’t bore you with that.

Instead, why don’t you sign up to Bright Works and get started on helping charities with their projects?

Or if you’re a charity, why not submit your project now?

And we’re always looking for your feedback and ways we can improve, so leave a comment below or fill in this feedback form if there’s something you want to let us know about.

We look forward to hearing from you!

- Ben and the Bright One team

The buzzword is digital and the result can be dynamite; the question is how do you use the former to generate the latter? The answer is: using traditional customer-oriented marketing in a new-fashioned way!

In line with various white papers on the subject, the key to driving engagement with your supporters and service users is to create a more personalised experience on and offline. In this digital age where the internet is the first port of call for information, Bright One is looking at the internet’s role in building charities’ brand experiences.

The ‘Social Graph’ uses personal information that people put online and looks at how they relate to their social connections. This commonly uses the social networks that you are probably on: Facebook; Twitter; perhaps LinkedIn – as well as scoping the rest of the internet. It gives you the ability to target markets via both their own online social activity (such as Likes) and that of their social connections. Take Facebook for instance: there are fans or ‘Likers’ of a brand, and their friends. The latter is a whole new target group for your brand – ready set with accessible contact details.

The ‘Social Graph’ potentially allows you to reach a larger number of people. It also allows you to use your markets’ online information to target them with personalised messages, which are statistically far more effective than generic messages. The British Heart Foundation is just one charity including this approach in their strategy; is it time for you to take notice of the tangible results that social media can generate too…?

We’re delighted that Bright Works, our microvolunteering app, received the award for third place in the Discover E-Volunteering competition, the only competition in Europe which aims to promote the most interesting projects in which volunteers help others via the Internet.

Over 80 applications from organisations from 19 European countries were received and were great examples of various e-volunteering activities happening: free web counseling, forming assistance and self-help groups, e-tutoring, sharing professional skills and knowledge and many more.

The International Selection Committee chose the best 12 initiatives, with over 18,000 people then voting for the best e-volunteering projects in an online poll. The official announcement of the winners took place on December 1st in Warsaw at the Gala of Volunteering, the final event of the European Year of Volunteering 2011.

We were delighted to be awarded alongside some other amazing projects and look forward to developing Bright Works further following this success.

You can see who the other winners are here and find out more about Bright Works here (and make sure you sign up too!)

Bright One board member Zoe Amar (@zoeamar) has been hard at work with Lasa,  the charity that provides technology and welfare rights advice, as well as influencing policy on advice, legal services and third sector technology.

Lasa’s new annual review demonstrates the impact it has had in its work with thousands of charities and government bodies across the UK. And what better way to get that impact across in a clear and simple way than an infographic?

We really like the idea and are thinking about doing something similar for our upcoming annual report. To find out more about the difference that Lasa has made this year, you can also download a copy of their 2010-2011 Annual Review.

Everyone keeps going on about the gloomy economic climate and inevitable double dip… and while we leave such judgments and forecasts to the professionals, where does this leave charities and how can Bright One help?

In order to cement their place in the ‘marketplace’, one of the most important things a charity can do is to ensure their proposition is bang on target. Bright One can help clients achieve this focus and ensure it is concisely and clearly communicated.

Macmillan Cancer Support is one such charity that recently felt the need to address its public image and counter the common misconception that the charity just provides palliative / end of life care to terminally ill patients. While Macmillan nurses are a key part of the charity’s service, Macmillan wanted to draw attention to its entire suite of services.

The charity’s new integrated brand campaign Every Step of the Way centres around a TV advertisement, which you may have seen, along with print, digital and radio too (keep your eye out on the underground). Targeted at a broader audience than Macmillan has previously targeted, it encourages the public as a whole to reassess the charity’s role. Macmillan’s suite of services is spelled out in every step of the advertisement, from the nurses and therapists helping you through treatment, to the advisers telling you which benefits you’re entitled to and the community supporting you online. An effective twist is that the filming focuses on the feet – reinforcing the message that Macmillan supports you every ‘step’ of the way.

The response to the TV advertisement has been varied to say the least. While some have condemned it for lack of emotion (an impression given by the lack of eye contact), others have praised it for accurately portraying, without ostentation, the situations that one faces when affected by cancer: ‘flashy it isn’t – but it shouldn’t be’.

It is a far cry from Macmillan’s previous campaign, Good Day, but the creative brief was wholly different… Does that mean it is more effective or less so? Please post your comments below.

Bit of a update on Bright Works for you:

• New features coming soon – sign up now to keep updated >>
• Looking to add your project to Bright Works? – get in touch >>
• Plenty of projects live up at the moment – help them now >>
• We’re heading to the final of the Discover E-Volunteering competition – thanks for your support!

Bright Works Feature Update

We launched Bright Works, our micro-volunteering app, back in July to a warm welcome. We knew that was when the hard work began though and we’ve been working with the lovely team at Dharmafly to make that happen.

With that said, the next iteration of Bright Works will soon be with us with the introduction of a “slippy tank” (think a similar interface to how Google Maps works), so we ‘ll soon be able to add lots more projects and help more charities. The above image is a sneak peak and there are some final tweaks to be put in place, so make sure you sign up to Bright Works to be alerted of when the feature goes live.

Add your project to Bright Works

And if you’re a charity, social enterprise or other non-profit who could use help from a global community of volunteers – for free – simply send us an email and we’ll get going on adding your project to Bright Works.

We’re working on a self-service option and should have that up and running in the near future, so that you can add projects to Bright Works yourself.

Current projects on Bright Works

That being said, there’s still projects being added all the time that you can help with.

For example, The Bloomtrigger Project are pioneering a new, visual model of online fundraising to empower people to help protect rainforest in a simple, affordable and a creative way. They’re looking for help with their PR campaign and need to contact business and companies that might be interested in the project, so if you think you can help then sign up and claim one of the tasks now.

There’s also AfghanAid, Unlock and more to help, so there’s never been a better time to get microvolunteering!

Discover E-Volunteering Competition Finals

We let you know a few months ago about the Discover E-Volunteering competition, where Bright Works had been shortlisted for the final voting.

We’re delighted to have been been invited to the final, so thanks for all your votes!

The announcement of the winners will take place on the 1st December during the Final Gala in Warsaw, Poland, which is being organized as an event accompanying the Final Conference of the European Year of Volunteering 2011.

We’ll be reporting back on how we got on, so cross your fingers…

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Phew! That’s all for now – happy volunteering!