There are plenty of advisory organisations like South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau, SYFAB, whose remit is to keep their service users abreast of the latest issues in a particular area. For SYFAB it is news about funding in South Yorkshire, but for other organisations it could be information about equalities in London, or service provision in rural areas. Creating regular digests on these "niche" topics can be an incredibly time-consuming job involving the regular scanning of various news sources to generate content, collate it, prioritise it, and re-purpose it in the appropriate form for the reader.

Any organisation that is carrying out this type of work will save themselves a load of time by using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Using a "feed aggregator" such as Google Reader, or a browser that supports RSS, your overworked editor can automatically be informed of any new content from sites that publish feeds, rather than having to scan it themselves. SYFAB have been using RSS for a while now and it has helped them incredibly.

One problem with RSS is that many websites don't offer feeds. SYFAB have got around this by also using a FireFox extension called Updates Scanner. This clever little tool regularly scans websites and alerts the editor when new content is found. It is not perfect and has a few issues with bookmarks, but it does the job nonetheless.

Through RSS and Update Scanner, SYFAB are able to gather all the information that they need for their digests. An important additional part of their work is to present the information in a way that is relevant and digestable for their customers - small nonprofit organisations throughout South Yorkshire. This is the part of the job that there is unfortunately no substitute for humans! Once re-purposed, the information is communicated to service users through the funding updates and the new funding news blog.

For organisation that don't need to repurpose content, the process can be further automated. At a recent brainstorming meeting Simon Berry of RuralNet explained to me how their news digest was further automated using social bookmarking tool, Delicious. On scanning relevant articles using RSS, their digest editor adds a Delicious bookmark. These bookmarks, along with titles and a summary of the article are automatically sucked out of Delicious straight into their website. Ruralnet even have an automated process for converting the information into an email and sending it out to members.

So while SYFAB have a requirement to repurpose content, I am hopeful that they can make their process more sophisticated by learning from Ruralnet. Watch this space on that one. This is clearly an area where a little investment upfront to get the workflow right, has the potential to deliver huge productivity savings.

On a related note - it is also worth saying that the free Google Alerts tool is a great way of finding out when people are talking about your organisation. Thanks to Amy Sample-Ward for that one, who has been consistently providing useful input to the Digital Makeover project.

A second related note - we have touched on the Delicious social bookmarking tool in this post. It has all kinds of uses that you wouldn't immediately expect. An upcoming post about SYFAB's Funding News blog will reveal more.