Bright One goes to the Not-For-Profit ‘Tweetup’

On Wednesday 25th, we went down to the nfptweetup, a meet up of Twitter users – and those interested in the potential of Twitter and other social media – who work at, or with, not-for-profit organisations.

If you don’t know what Twitter is, here’s a short video that will explain more:

(There are more excellent ‘Social Media in Plain English’ videos over at CommonCraft.)

We attended the first nfptweetup, which took place on 25 November 2008, with around 30 people from the charity and not-for-profit sector gathering in the infamous (among certain circles) Coach and Horses pub in Soho, London. You can read how that first event with here and you can here Ben talking about the slide he designed for the ‘collaborative slideshow‘ here.

Hosted by Christian Aid, and sponsored by Justgiving, this time there were over 60 people in attendance, which was over twice the amount of attendees from last time and shows how not-for-profits are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of Twitter and are keen to explore it more.

The collaborative slideshow was a fun way to capture and share ideas and views on how not-for-profits can use Twitter. People created just one slide each that captured either a tip, a trick or an example of not-for-profits using Twitter, or some Twitter activity that’s relevant to not-for-profits.

Here’s the collaborative slideshow from Wednesday’s event, which was put together by Rachel Beer (See if you can spot Ben’s slide!):

At the event, attendees were split into five groups to each discuss a different use of Twitter:
1. Tools
2. Usage
3. Fundraising
4. Integration
5. Reputation & Policy

It’s fair to say that everyone was keen to share what they had learned and were also keen to learn from others. The insights and learnings from the discussions were useful for many different organisations in many different ways, and you can see the results of the discussion at the bottom of this page on the wiki.

You can find out more about the night’s events from Ed Walker and Howard Lake’s blog posts, as well as from the nfptweetup wiki.

There’s also plenty of photos on Flicker that will give you a flavour of what happened on the night:

Thanks to Rachel, Amy, Paul and Jonathan for organising a very successful event that created a whole lot of useful content for those who couldn’t make it down on the night – including a podcast that s due to appear soon.

The next nfptweetup is due to take place in three months time, so keep your eyes peeled on Twitter for when the date is announced. We’ll also be tweeting about it via Bright One’s Twitter profile – www.twitter.com/brightonecomms. Perhaps we’ll see you at the next one?