IOF Scotland Conference 2009
Attended the IOF Scotland conference today at the Glasgow Hilton hotel. It was a great day and will continue tomorrow. Some of my highlights from today -
The day started with the opening plenary by Young Dawkins III from the University of Edinburgh. His speech was pretty inspirational and he finished off with a rousing reference to his young baby who may rely on the orgs in the room during his upbringing. One interesting stat that Young gave was that the average UK Higher Ed spends around 37p for every £1 they raise. Edinburgh spend 18p so they are doing well.
The first full session I went to was by Jon Duschinsky from bethechange. His session was entitled Window on the world and he had some great examples of innovative fundraising from around the world. Interesting fact from his session was that Starbucks are doing more for good causes than most NGO's. His session ended with us all doing a Happy dance! Honest!
Jon's quote of the session - 'Bring a child to your next board meeting and give them chocolate every time they ask 'why?'
I then went on to see Howard Lake talk about 'New Media on a shoestring' his session had many highlights but the main thing that I had never heard about was ipadio which is a phone blogging tool that howard has been using at UK fundraising. Fundraising.co.uk has set up a live blog which aggregates all the twitter quotes over the conference. You can access this here.
I spent the first session after lunch giving a video interview to Howard Lake for publishing on Fundraising.co.uk - Which was one of my most nerve wracking experiences...ever!
Final full session that I went to was by Jon Parsons from the Woodland Trust where he talked about the work they are doing down there. They are doing some seriously impressive stuff but the thing that impressed me most was the way they were using trees attached to blue tooth transmitters so that the trees in the woods could, literally, talk to the folks walking through the trees. Even better was the fact that the tree itself was powering the transmitters!
Final plenary of the day was by Jon Duschinsky who was talking about Quantum fundraising. His point was around the fact that people are worth more to a charity than money. Lot's of people coming together to make change happen. Quote from the this session - 'People are the new money'
I've not done any of the speakers proper justice but it was a great day and people seemed really enthusiastic about the new ideas they have picked up during the day. Follow the live blog tomorrow here.