Click4Causes held the first half day seminar last Thursday on Social Media and how fundraisers can use the power of this to build awareness and interest in their cause.

There was a wide diversity of attendees from local government, community interest companies, banking, fundraisers, charities, trusts and the Open University Enterprise Hub representative.

Ian Mckendrick’s presentation was designed to enable even the most non-technical people to use Social Networks like twitter and facebook to get more business, more fans, more funds or more awareness for their company, group or organisation. The section on how to Listen, Fish and Establish Trust prompted the most questions and quickly explained how a huge number of people all over the world can be engaged in conversations and subtly led to take action in a very short period of time.

Lincoln Bedeau of ASKMK.net who gave an excellent talk about the recent development of ASKMK.net, a YouTube style website for promoting products, businesses and events. Lincoln highlighted one recent event for Willen Hospice that had raised over £100,000 and how with facebook fan pages and AskMK.net publishing the video of the event there was over 560 unique views in the first month. For fun I used my twitter account for Click4Causes to send “if I was a girl I could have attended this http://bit.ly/St0R8” and within 10 minutes another 20 people viewed the video. Its interesting that following my tweets, Ian McKendrick’s blog and tweets and its inclusion on the eSay-uk.com fundraiser links that the video has now being viewed over another 600 unique times in 3 days. I will be good to see the impact for Willen Hospice from this increase in viewing in the next few weeks.

Lincoln’s presentation was then followed by Simon Parslow of eSay-uk.com . Simon heads up a new and exciting company with some very cool and fresh ideas. They have their eye firmly on the social networking scene and have developed a unique online shop which takes a portion of the marketing budgets of its suppliers and distributes these to customers, charities and fundraisers to help raise money for their respective causes. The visions that Simon shared with us during his presentation of how his online service is creating new communities through social networking specifically to influence suppliers to deliver the products and services people want is truly amazing.

Thanks to Ian, Lincoln and Simon for coming to present and to all the attendees that took the time to come and participate.