I’m Danny from SYFAB, the willing volunteers in Simon and the Charity Technology Trust’s digital makeover! Firstly, i’d really like to thank you for taking such an interest in this project and giving such thorough and thought-provoking commentary and suggestions in your two posts so far.

And secondly i’d like to give you a quick update on one particular aspect of our recent work – which is that i’ve started a blog to deliver news on upcoming funding opportunities, and communicate with some of the groups we work with about the sort of developments we’re trying to make.
The site is:
http://fundingnews.wordpress.com/

And I go into a lot more detail about the purpose of the site and the reasons for starting it in this post:
http://fundingnews.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/what-this-website-is-for/

I’m hoping that this site will be the beginnings of SYFAB’s shift from traditional top-down information to user-generated resources, which I hope we’ll get to via a series of steps.

We’re starting off with me (and therefore SYFAB) talking at our readers. The next step is to encourage the readers to start talking back. And then the most exciting step is to get the readers to start talking to each other without needing SYFAB. And if we can get there, we might just have the beginnings of a community of fundraisers sharing information and experiences and producing useful resources without needing an ‘expert’ organisation like SYFAB. Which I find a really exciting prospect.

So far we have built up a respectable number of readers and subscribers (mainly by email, a few by RSS). And I think the next step is to really start to encourage comments and discussion. I’d really like to try to focus on one particular funding programme and build on the basic information about it using the knowledge and experiences of the readers. I think this would be a great example to illustrate the limitations of the basic information that we’ve traditionally relied on, and how much we can improve on it using our shared knowledge.

And i’m hoping that will be a great example we can use not just with the people that may ultimately be participants in an online community of fundraisers, but also to encourage support and participation within SYFAB and with the funders of our work.

Which brings me onto one other point which I hope we’ll talk about in the digital makeover – the issues that arise when trying to make some of these big changes to existing practices within an organisation.

Anyway, I have probably gone on for long enough for now! Thank you once again for your insights so far. Long may they continue!

Best wishes,
Danny