iT4C at the ICT Hub Conference

Last Wednesday (28 March) the ICT Hub held their second national conference at the Arsenal Emirates stadium, Highbury. An impressive venue, fine weather and over 220 attendees, made for an enjoyable and productive day. The feedback from the last national conference had informed the changes in this one, allowing for longer breaks for better networking and more workshops for interactive discussion and knowledge share.

Speakers on the day were Sian Basker, chair of the Hub advisory board who opened the conference with a speech setting the scene with examples of the use of IT in the community and voluntary sector and, appropriate to the venue, gave football related examples, comparing the ICT needs & budget of a large team with those of an after-school club.

Martin Jarvis MD of Blackbaud spoke of the importance of reputation for charities and organisations in the sector and how branding, and a co-ordinated approach to all communication channels, be it Internet; websites, email, electronic newsletters, blogs etc or paper-based, annual reports, flyers, newsletters etc is vital to the way an organisation is perceived by their clients and supporters.

Workshops during the day included, Communicating Using ICT (a lively workshop about new advances in Internet based tools such as U Tube, MySpace, blogs, wikis etc), Things to Think About – planning your projects, How to Cost and Fund your ICT needs (an extremely useful workshop aimed at people with little technical knowledge being faced with the daunting prospect of planning your organisation's ICT needs and budget), and Fundraising Through the Internet (co-hosted by Megan Griffith who has just completed ‘How online communities can make the net work for VCS’*).

*The above booklet and ‘How to Cost and Fund ICT’ are available free of charge from the ICT Hub tel: 0800 652 4737

To those of our readers who attended we hope you had useful and enjoyable day, It was a pleasure to meet those of you who we did. Please send any general feedback to: conference@iT4Communities.org.uk and we can ensure the Hub conference organisers receive it.

Workshop - Free support

Anne Stafford of iT4C ran a workshop jointly with Marcus Otite of Superhighways; an opportunity for the attendees to discuss the support that is available for groups free or of low cost provided by volunteers from the IT profession or by ‘Circuit Riders’, funded or part funded workers based usually in CVS.  As you know, iT4C are the people to ask to find an IT professional willing to work as a volunteer. To find a ‘Circuit Rider’ near you or who may be able to assist, you can look on the ICT Hub website or phone their helpdesk 0800 652 4737

You can view the workshop slides in Powerpoint format.