A slightly different post and video this time, reporting back on a fascinating meeting last week to brainstorm some ideas improve SYFAB's funding service using web based tools. It is amazing what you can come up with in a couple of hours when you get a few heads together. In William Hoyle from Charity Technology Trust, Jon Mell of Web 2.0 consultancy Trovus, and Simon Berry from Ruralnet there was plenty of experience in the area of nonprofits and the Internet.

Discussions centred around SYFAB's funding service, which, as explained by Danny Anthrobus in a previous post, SYFAB are keen to develop to incorporate valuable feedback from their service-users. Could there also be a scope to create a community around the sharing of funding information in the South Yorkshire area?

The video provides a good digest of the discussions and features some of the insights from the attendees. Some of key points were:

• How would funders respond to feedback published by frontline organisations?
  It was noted that they may take exception to criticism, but through constructive process of feedback and clarification, it could help the funders improve the quality of their information

• Would frontline organisations want to share intelligence about funders in what is a very competitive funding marketplace?
  There is certainly a danger that the incentives for sharing may not be sufficient, but could the working culture of the nonprofit sector counter that?

• What is the right strategy for creating a community?
  It was widely agreed that for a community to develop around fundraising in South Yorkshire, SYFAB would have to invest significant resource in facilitating the process. One tactic suggested involved starting off with a small exclusive niche group of users and create demand by promoting their success stories to a wider audience - a model that served Facebook well.

Whilst the discussions were centred around SYFAB, I think that these are insights that other nonprofit organisations can apply in their own contexts. It certainly pays to be as user-focussed as possible before investing resource in new initiatives. Understanding what motivates your customers will help you to offer the right incentives for people.

In the meeting, there were also some great suggestions regarding SYFAB's new Funding News blog, and how that can be developed using a few clever tools. I will come back to this in a future post.