NEW Funding News from SYFAB website

I’ve started a new Funding News from SYFAB website with information on funding opportunities for community and voluntary organisations. This is all part of our work towards a new online funding information service. Click here to go to the site.

There will still be occasional posts on here about making good use of technology in your fundraising. Whenever I post new stuff here, i’ll link to it from the Funding News site, so you can keep updated on both sites by following just the Funding News site.

Thanks,
Danny

Key Fund Yorkshire Seek New Chair Designate

Key Fund Yorkshire is looking for a special individual to lead its Board of Directors.

Chair Designate
£5000 per annum + expenses

Recruited initially as a Director, the appointed individual will work with the current Chair, Directors, Members of the Company and the Chief Executive Officer with a view of assuming full Chair responsibilities no later than December 2008.

An annual payment of £5000 will accompany the role plus general expenses.

For further information and details of how to apply please visit:
www.keyfundyorks.org.uk/vacancies

Deadline: 22 May 2008

Apologies for lack of posting

Hi,

So I haven’t exactly been overwhelming readers of this blog with content just lately. Apologies for that. It’s partly because i’ve been busy getting my online course on Finding and Researching Funders Online up and running. And partly because, well, I haven’t really worked out what this blog is supposed to be yet. Originally the idea was that it would have articles related to what i was doing with the IT Project at SYFAB, whilst over at SYFAB’s main site, we have Funding News Extra as the place where our articles on new funding opportunities and upcoming deadlines go. This is all going to change over the next few months - i’ll talk about how soon. But for now, i need to have a proper think about the aims of this blog. So i’m going to spend a bit of time doing some mind-mapping (my new favourite planning tool) and i’ll be back soon with some new ideas and hopefully a plan for this blog.

Cheers,
Danny

ICT Hub National Awards

The ICT Hub National Awards for the Use of ICT in the Voluntary and Community Sector are open to applications. The awards aim to showcase examples of good practice from voluntary organisations who have effectively implemented ICT and have benefited as a result. Winners don’t get any funding but the prestige and recognition is useful to promote your group and use in future funding applications. The closing date for applications is Friday 8 February. More information is available from The ICT Hub website

Replacement for Neighbourhood Renewal Fund

In SYFAB’s December/January issue of Funding News, we give a brief update on plans for a new government fund for neighbourhoods. Since we went to press, a bit more information about the Working Neighbourhoods Fund has appeared. See New Start for more details.

Vote for Elsecar Heritage Railway!

Members of Elsecar Heritage Railway came along to SYFAB’s AGM in Rotherham this week. They told us that they are through to the public vote stage of the Big Lottery Fund’s People’s Millions programme. The group will appear on Yorkshire TV’s Calendar on Tuesday November 27th in a head-to-head competition with the Calder Play Project from Hebden Royd Town Council (Hebden Bridge).

If the Railway wins the public vote, this funding will enable them to install a level crossing across Tingle Bridge Lane at Hemingfield and extend the railway down to Cortonwood Retail Park. This would benefit the Yorkshire community, schools and children’s education. So you can help Elsecar Heritage Railway to receive the funding they are looking for by voting for them anytime from 09:00am to Midnight on the 27th November 2007. Voting telephone numbers will be broadcast during Calendar and will also be available on the Big Lottery Fund’s website.

More information on the People’s Millions programme can be found at www.thepeoplesmillions.org.uk and more information on Elsecar Heritage Railway can be found here

UPDATE Unfortunately for Elsecar, they didn’t win the public vote. Congratulations to the Calder Play Project in Hebden Bridge who will receive a grant of £68,000 for their new playground. Lists of the winners from each region are on the People’s Millions website

Help out the ICT Hub’s Research - Identifying Funders that Fund ICT

The ICT Hub have commissioned some research to find funders who will fund ICT (Information and Communications Technology). This is a follow-up to their January 2007 Sources of Funders research, which came up with 52 possibilities (the original report and the details of the funders they found are available to download from here).

This follow-up is much the same - they are looking to add to the list. So if you have successfully raised funds for work that had an ICT element, or you know about funders that will fund ICT, then the consultants carrying out the research on behalf of the ICT Hub would be delighted to hear from you. Please pass on any info to Sophy Hallam at Cadence Works (email)

Finding and researching funders online - Section 3: Researching Individual Funders

This section covers how you research a funder once you’ve found them, helping you to prioritise the information that’s most important and save you time.

3.1 Information categories
3.2 The language funders use
3.3 Prioritising information – can you apply, apply for what, how to apply.

3.1 Information categories

When you’ve found a funder, there is a lot of information to find out about them. You can waste a lot of time by not researching funders carefully.

How do you decide whether to make an application or not? And what to apply to them for? And how to apply? What information do you need to know about the funder to make those decisions?

Here’s a list of some of the pieces of information that you would want to know about a funder – anything that could help you decide whether to apply and how to tackle an application.

• Name and contact details
• Geographical area they are based in
• Geographical area they fund work in
• Aim/mission of the funder
• Funding criteria/objects/priorities
• Type of organisation that can be funded
• Size of grants available
• Length of grant
• Application process
• Deadlines/meeting dates
• Names of trustees
• Exclusions
• Who they have funded previously

Funders’ websites can be organised very differently, so finding all this information can be very time-comsuming. Section 3.3 looks at ways of prioritsing the information to help make your research more efficient. However, there is another issue that can get in the way – the language funders use.

3.2 The language funders use

Funders are very diverse and present information about themselves in a variety of ways. So, researching funders isn’t as easy as working your way down the list of points above. Different funders often use different terms to mean the same thing. And even more confusingly, they sometimes use the same term to refer to different things.

Here are a few examples:

• The overall aim of the funder – this could be called aim, mission, objective, purpose. It tends to be a fairly general short statement about the funder’s values, their approach to funding, and what they intend to do through their funding. You can often find this either on the home page or the ‘About us’ page of a funder’s website.
• Capital and revenue - capital funding generally means funding to pay for capital assets, or things you could sell, such as buildings or equipment. Revenue refers to funding for things that get used over time, such as staff costs, rent, publicity, etc. However, sometimes funders may state that they don’t fund revenue costs, when what they mean is that they don’t fund ongoing core costs, but they will fund revenue costs that are part of a project. Looking more carefully at the funder’s guidance notes and for examples of previous grants made can help clarify things. As can a query made directly to the funder.
• Funding priorities – the categories or areas of work that a funder wants to support. These can be known as priorities, programmes, criteria, objects. For some funders, there will be a fairly straightforward list of priority headings and your work will fit into one or more of them. For others, there are a number of programmes, all of which will have their own set of priorities, and may target different beneficiaries.

Often, the funding priorities, the beneficiaries and the overall aim of the funder are not clearly distinguished from each other – you need to use your judgement to decide what the funder is all about and whether it is a close enough match with your organisation and its activities.

3.3 Prioritising your research

To help save time when researching funders, you can research in stages, looking for the most crucial bits of information first. Starting off by finding out whether or not you are eligible will help you eliminate funders that definitely aren’t suitable for your group and to spend more time researching the ones that might be.

The list of items of information that you would want to know about a funder can be divided into three main categories:

• Can you apply - What are the most important details that help you decide whether your group is eligible to apply to this funder?
• What to apply for - What bits of further information help you decide what costs, activities or projects to apply to this funder for?
• How to apply - And finally, what additional information gives you a better idea of what the funder wants, what they do in practice, and helps you decide how you should tackle your application and what would improve your case for support from this funder?

Can you apply?
The basics that help you decide whether you are likely to be eligible to apply to a funder:

• The types of work or types of people that the funder will fund (often called funding priorities)
• The areas of the country that the funder will (or won’t) fund in
• What types of organisation can be funded, i.e. do you have to be a registered charity?
• The overall aim of the funder.

If your organisation definitely don’t fit in with all these conditions for the funder, there is no point in researching further; i.e. if you aren’t eligible, you don’t need to know how long the application form is, or who the trustees are.

What to apply for?
If you think you are eligible, or if you aren’t sure, you can do some further research. Points to look for now can help you decide what activities or costs you could apply to this funder for:

• The size of grants offered and their length (one-off or multi-year)
• Whether grants will pay for revenue or capital costs or both
• When are the deadlines for applications
• Check for a list of exclusions to see if there is anything on there that would make your group or a potential project ineligible, i.e. sometimes specific types of organisation such as branches of national charities are ineligible, or certain types of work.

How to apply?
If you think you are eligible to apply, and have got something in mind to apply for, there may well be other information available that will help you with your application. You can check the website for:

• Details of previous grants made by the funder – you can work out the sort of size grants that a funder gives and the sort of work they have funded in the past
• Application guidelines – that should give you guidance on what is involved in the application process and what to put in an application
• Any reports, publications or research published by the funder – this may give you an idea of what the interests of the funder are and help you tailor an application to meet what the funder wants to fund as well as what you want to be funded.
• Frequently asked questions – it is well worth skimming through a section like this to make sure you aren’t making any of the same mistakes that other applicants have made.

Through this process you are gradually filtering out funders that aren’t suitable for your organisation, finding out which ones are most suitable for which of your activities, and then building up a clear picture of each funder, equipping yourself with the information about them that will help you ensure that your application ticks all the funder’s boxes and gives you the best chance of success.

Example

Here’s a quick example of prioritising your funding research in practice:
Take a look at the website of the Yapp Charitable Trust - www.yappcharitabletrust.org.uk

First of all, you want to check whether you can apply, so:

• Funding priorities - from the navigation bar, you will see a hyperlink to “Our priorities”, which you might expect to give you the main areas of work that the trust wants to support. However, in this case, this will take you to the trust’s overall aims (an example of the differences in the language funders use). For this trust, the “What we fund” link shows you the main subject areas, which are: elderly people; children and young people; people with disabilities or mental health problems; people trying to overcome problems of a social origin; education and learning; scientific and medical research.
• Eligible areas of the country - click on “Who can apply” to check eligibility. The first line on this page states that only charities registered in England and Wales can apply. There do not appear to be any other restrictions (although a funder may prefer to fund in particular areas - you can check this later).
• Eligible types of organisation - again using the “Who can apply” link, we have already seen that registered charities only can apply. The rest of this page runs through the other restrictions: i.e. only for small charities (annual expenditure under £60,000 who have been operating for at least three years
• Overall aim of the funder - as we noted above, clicking on “Our priorities” shows you the main aims of the Yapp Trust, i.e. sustaining the existing work of small charities working for unpopular causes, particularly for those working to improve the lives of marginalised people and making effective use of volunteers

If you have researched this far and you don’t:

• Meet the trust’s aim, and
• Fit into at least one of their funding priorities, and
• Fit into their eligibility critera

then there isn’t really any point in researching further. Your time will be better spent finding other funders. However, if you do fit meet all these criteria, you can research further, looking at what you could apply to the Yapp Trust for:

• The size of grants offered and their length (one-off or multi-year) - click on “Size of grants” to see that grants are generally for up to £3,000 for up to three years. Most grants are over more than one year (which is unusual).
• Whether grants will pay for revenue or capital costs or both - again, click on “size of grants” to see that grants are for running costs and salaries
• When are the deadlines for applications - click on “useful dates”. This shows that the trustees meet three times per year and gives the deadlines for applications for those meetings
• Check for a list of exclusions - click on “What we do not fund”. This page runs through the eligibility criteria once more, but also gives some more specific examples of work that cannot be funded, including New work, childcare, debt advice, etc.

From this stage of your research, you will be able to think about an aspect of your work that the Yapp Trust might consider funding, such as a contribution towards running costs. You can make sure what you want to apply for is not in their list of exclusions, and you can plan when you need to send your application. Now you know you are eligible to apply, and have thought about what you want to apply for, you can research how to apply and how to improve your chances of success:

• Details of previous grants made by the funder - click on “recent grants” for a basic analysis of the grant sizes given and a list of specific examples of grants made. You can check to see if the grants are mainly given in any particular area of work or area of country. And you can check to see what the average grant size offered tends to be.
• Application guidelines – click on “How to apply”. This page tells you that copies of the application form and guidance notes are available by contacting the Trust directly and not on the website.
• Any reports, publications or research published by the funder – in this case, there aren’t any.
• Frequently asked questions – there is no FAQ section on the website.

The final stage of research is all about building up a good picture of the funder and how it operates. In the case of the Yapp Trust, having got as much information as you can off the website, you can contact the Trust for their application form and guidance notes. Then, once you are putting an application together, if you have any queries, you can contact the Trust directly with a specific question, or contact a support organisation such as SYFAB (remember that some smaller trusts don’t have any staff so do not take enquiries from applicants).

Conclusion

Fundraising is always time-consuming, but you can make it less so by improving your research, and prioritising the information you gather. This way you can make sure that you only apply to funders that are appropriate; that is, funders whose priorities match yours.

Search for and find some possible funders – use a combination of SYFAB services, other available services and your own searching.

When you’ve found a website or webpage for a funder that looks promising, bookmark it (and subscribe to their news feed if they have one).

Then do your research into those individual funders, starting with the key information to help you decide whether your organisation could apply, and, if you could, then going into more detail, by considering what you would apply to them for, and how you apply. Then find out as much as you can about them to help you tailor your application to that funder.

As ever, good luck with your fundraising!

Feedback! To keep my funders happy, i need to collect info on which groups are accessing these tutorials. So, firstly, please contact me to let me know your name, organisation and email address, and which tutorial(s) you’ve worked through. You can fill in the contact form below or email me (Danny) directly to do this.

Next, comments and criticisms! Please let me know what you think of these tutorials. Did they make sense? Were they useful? What’s wrong with them? Please either send me a few comments along with your contact details using the contact form or emailing me. OR you can fill in a specific evaluation form (Click here to access the form) and send it back to me. If you are going to work through more than one tutorial you don’t need to contact me every time - just the once is fine!

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

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Finding and researching funders online - Section 2: Finding funders

This section is all about making use of the services available to find possible funders for your organisation. This covers:
2.1 Services available from SYFAB
2.2 The free and charged-for funding information services available online
2.3 Similar organisations – a new approach to finding funders

2.1 Funding information services available from SYFAB

There are three main routes for finding funding information from SYFAB. All of the services are available for free for voluntary and community groups in South Yorkshire.

SYFAB funding search

SYFAB’s Information Service can do funding searches to find possible sources of funding for specific activities or projects for your organisation. The service does a piece of research to find funders whose aims and activities match up with your group or project. You will receive a pack of information through the post with summaries of each funder.

Funding News and Funding News Extra

You can keep an eye on the information covered in Funding News and our weekly news bulletin on the SYFAB website for any funds that might be relevant for your group.

SIFT, the SYFAB Internet Funding Toolkit

SIFT is a simple piece of software to guide you to some of the useful information about funding available on the internet. This includes some funders’ own websites, but also local organisations that have some funding information, websites with general funding advice and websites with searchable funding databases. SIFT is free to groups in South Yorkshire.

For more information on all SYFAB’s services, see our main website – www.syfab.org.uk

2.2 Other funding information services

There are lots of organisations around offering funding information services – a lot of these are aimed at big charities that fundraise mainly from individuals so need to keep track of a lot of supporters. For organisations fundraising from grant-makers, such as charitable trusts, lottery funders, and government funders, there are a selection of websites and software applications that have funding search tools and funding news services. The quality and usefulness of the services is very variable so some guidance on how to use them well could save you time in your funding research.

SYFAB have produced a Guide to Funding Information Services, which you can download by clicking here

Tips for success:

If you do find funders that looks like they might be of interest to your organisation, remember to bookmark them!

When doing your initial research and trying to find funders, don’t get too bogged down in the details on each one – try to find a basic summary of their work and bookmark them if they sound promising. The next section of this tutorial will show you how to save time when researching individual funders.

2.3 Similar organisations – A new approach for finding funders

Another way of finding possible funders for your organisation is to learn from other people – specifically, which funders have funded organisations that are similar to yours. This includes those working in the same area, doing the same sort of activities, or working with similar groups of people. Then find out who funded them. If they funded a group similar to yours, maybe they will fund you too.

How to find groups like yours

• Local knowledge – what networks and partnerships are you involved in? Is there a local directory of voluntary and community groups in your area?
• Umbrella bodies – are there national associations, or support networks for your type of work? Can you find lists of members from these organisations?
• Guidestar – the Guidestar website is a register of all the charities in England and Wales. It uses information from the Charity Commission register, and allows charities to add more information to their entry. So you can search the Guidestar site by keyword to find charities similar to yours, then look for details of their funders. Guidestar has scanned copies of the annual reports and annual accounts of charities; in the accounts, there should be a list of funders in the income section of the notes to the financial statements.

Remember that some funders will fund an organisation because of the type of work it is doing, and some (local trusts especially) will fund an organisation because of the area of the country it is in. So, start by looking at similar organisations in nearby areas and work your way outwards. You can use the search engine tips from Section 1 to help you with your keyword searching on Guidestar. The SIFT guide to Guidestar might also help (More information on how to access SIFT is above. The specific SIFT guide to Guidestar can be accessed by clicking here).

Tips for success:

Be warned, it can get very tedious and time-consuming looking through lots and lots of sets of accounts. If the charity has their own website, you could have a look at this first to see if the information is anywhere easier. And while you’re at it, having a look at what similar groups are doing might give you a few ideas to ‘borrow’ too!

Feedback! To keep my funders happy, i need to collect info on which groups are accessing these tutorials. So, firstly, please contact me to let me know your name, organisation and email address, and which tutorial(s) you’ve worked through. You can fill in the contact form below or email me (Danny) directly to do this.

Next, comments and criticisms! Please let me know what you think of these tutorials. Did they make sense? Were they useful? What’s wrong with them? Please either send me a few comments along with your contact details using the contact form or emailing me. OR you can fill in a specific evaluation form (Click here to access the form) and send it back to me. If you are going to work through more than one tutorial you don’t need to contact me every time - just the once is fine!

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Text only. No markup allowed.

Finding and researching funders online - Section 1: Internet research techniques

This section covers the basic techniques involved in internet research; that is, how to find the information you want, how to keep track of it, a few of the newer tools around for producing and keeping track of online information, and how to assess online information.

1.1 Search engine techniques
1.2 Storing information - bookmarking
1.3 Other research tools – blogs and RSS
1.4 Quality of information – evaluating websites

1.1 Search engine techniques

There are billions of web pages on the Internet, and more are added all the time. No-one is in charge of this; no-one keeps a record of all the information. Finding what you want can be hard.

Search engines are websites that allow you to search these billions of web pages to find the information you’re looking for. They are very powerful and can search millions of web pages very quickly. Learning how to carry out a good search is a great skill for finding what you want.

Search engines use software to find and catalogue new webpages, and they keep a record of what they find on them. People type in keywords that describe what they are looking for, and the search engines look for sites that match those keywords.

For this example, we will look at the biggest and most widely-used search engine - Google. The website address is: www.google.co.uk

This tutorial assumes that you already know the basics of internet searching. If you aren’t or if you want a refresher, more information on the basics of using search engines such as Google is available on the ‘How to use SIFT’ section of our software package, the SYFAB Internet Funding Toolkit. This software is free to voluntary and community groups in South Yorkshire – see www.syfab.org.uk/itproject.php for more information.

Other basic guides to using search engines are in the list of resources at the end of this section.

This tutorial will get on with tips on how to improve your searching. If you already have a lot of experience of using search engines, feel free to skip ahead.

Improving your Searches

Some of the main principles to follow when using search engines:

• Be specific in the keywords you search for, otherwise you will end up with too many websites to look at
• Keep it short – try not to use more than three or four keywords, and avoid words like ‘of’ ‘it’ ‘the’ and so on – imagine how may times those words appear in 11.5 billion web pages!
• Word order is important - search engines usually give priority to the first word you enter
• Think about the results you want. Use words or phrases that funders might use, i.e. “older people” rather than “old people”
• Remember the website you are looking for might not be on the first page of results.

Other techniques:

Search within a search:

Some search engines, including Google, allow you to search within a search. This means that you take your original search results and improve them by using different keyword/s.

The top section here shows our original results… scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click ‘Search within results’ to refine your search.

You can then enter your additional keywords in the box to refine your search. You could also just type your additional keyword after the original keyword.

Phrases:
You can also use quotation marks with your keywords – this asks the search engine to look for that exact phrase – for example “Sheffield city council funding”. This produces far fewer results (12 in this case):

Another way to refine your search is to use the minus symbol next to a word that is not relevant to your search, like so:

This will find all websites with the words funding and uk in them, but avoid those containing the word ‘arts’. This can be a useful tool, but remember that the minus symbol must be placed directly before the word you want to avoid, with no spaces.

Further reading and resources:

Google produce their own guide to their search engine – see www.google.com/help/basics.html

The ICT Hub is one of the national ‘hubs’ of expertise funded through the Change Up programme. Their website has a knowledgebase section with lots of useful IT related guidance and advice. This includes a guide to finding information on the internet
www.icthubknowledgebase.org.uk/searchingtheinternet

TechSoup, a website packed with articles and guides all about non-profit organisations using ICT. This includes a useful article covering advanced Google search tips
www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page7388.cfm?cg=searchterms&sg=search%20engine

1.2 Storing information - Bookmarking

Once you have found a funding website that might be useful, you will want to make sure you can find it again. You can use your web browser to save the website addresses of sites you want to visit again by using favourites (if you’re using Internet Explorer) or bookmarks (if you’re using Firefox). You can also organise your bookmarks into folders to help you find what you’re looking for more easily.

Note on web browsers
Over 90% of internet users use either Internet Explorer or Firefox, so information in this guide here covers these two browsers only. Users of Safari or Opera or other browsers can use the help option on your browser for more information.

How to bookmark a webpage
Bookmarking webpages is very straightforward using the menus of your internet browser. Go to the webpage you want to bookmark, then:

Using Internet Explorer:
Click on “Favorites” then “Add to Favorites”. Click OK

Using Firefox
Click on “Bookmarks” then “Bookmark this page”. Click OK

How to organise and manage your bookmarks

Using Internet Explorer
1. Click on “Favorites”.
2. Click on “Organize Favorites…”.
3. When box pops up click on the bookmark you want to move and drag it to the folder you want to add it to.
4. Create a new folder by clicking on “Create Folder”.
5. Rename folders by clicking on the folder you want to rename and clicking on “Rename Folder”.

Using Firefox
1. Click on “Bookmarks”
2. Click on “Organise bookmarks”
3. Click on bookmark you want to move and drag it to the folder you want to add it to.
4. To add a new folder click on “File”, then click on “New”, then click on “New Folder”.

Sharing bookmarks

There may well be other people in your organisation that would benefit from being able to access all the websites in your list of boomarks. There are a couple of ways to do this:

Import/Export bookmarks
The low-tech way is to export the bookmarks/favourites into a file which can then be distributed as necessary. The problem with this is that your bookmarks/ favourites will change over time, so you might end up with different lists on different computers.

How to do it:

Using Internet Explorer
1. Click on “File”
2. Click on “Import and Export”. This opens the Import/Export wizard
3. Click on “Next”, then select “Export Favorites” and click “Next” again
4. Make sure the “Favorites” folder is selected and click “Next” again
5. Choose where you would would like your favorites to be exported to and click “Next” again.
6. Click “Finish”
7. The file will be saved wherever you chose. It is an html file which can be emailed around, imported onto other people’s PCs and opened using any web browser.

Using Firefox
1. Click on “Bookmarks”
2. Click on “Organise bookmarks
3. In the bookmarks manager, click on “File”
4. Click on “Export”
5. Choose where you want to save the bookmarks file and click OK.
6. The file will be saved wherever you chose. It is an html file which can be emailed around, imported onto other people’s PCs and opened using any web browser.

Further reading and resources

The University of Aberdeen have produced a guide to bookmarking, including how to export and import bookmarks and how to save the content of websites (bookmarking just saves the location of the website).
www.abdn.ac.uk/webpack/factsheet4.shtml

Social Bookmarking
If you expect several different people to be involved in your research, and you all want access to the same set of bookmarks/favourites, then you could think about social bookmarking. This is a fairly new idea and a bit more high-tech than importing and exporting bookmarks.

Social bookmarking uses websites to allow you to store, organise, share and search bookmarks of web pages. Users save boomarks/favourites to a social bookmarking website. The bookmarks can be kept private, shared with specific individuals or shared publicly. The specified people can then browse and search these bookmarks.

Social bookmarking services encourage users to organise bookmarks using informal ‘tags’ instead of the traditional system of folders, whic helps when searchng for bookmarks.

Commonly used social bookmarking services include:
del.icio.us - del.icio.us
Digg - digg.com
StumbleUpon - www.stumbleupon.com

More information

Wikipedia has more information on social bookmarking and the services available.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

The excellent Common Craft website has a video that explains social bookmarking in a very straightforward way:
www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english

1.3 Other research tools – blogs and RSS

Blogs
Short for weblogs, blogs are a relatively new way of publishing information using the internet. For voluntary and community groups, there are quite a lot of blogs around that are useful, and there will almost certainly be some around covering information on your subject area. It is well worth remembering (as with any information you gather from the internet, or anywhere else for that matter) that you shouldn’t take information at face value: think about the quality, the source and the bias of the information. The next part of this section (evaluating websites) has more guidance on assessing the quality of information.

How to find blogs
There are various search tools around for blogs:

Google offer a blog search – from Google’s home page, click on ‘more’ then on ‘blog search’. The search tool works in exactly the same way as the main Google search engine.
www.google.co.uk/blogsearch

Technorati is a site that tracks blogs and provides a search engine for finding them.
www.technorati.com

Once you find a blog that you find interesting, you could look for that site’s ‘blogroll’ to find more useful sites – a blogroll is where a blogger features a list of blogs they read in the sidebar of their blog.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

News feeds allow you to track your favourite web sites and blogs and find out when they have updated or added new content. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. Some of the resources below explain what RSS is and how to get started with it in a very straghtforward way.

Further reading and resources:

The BBC produce an excellent guide to news feeds.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm

The ICT Hub Knowledgebase also has a good introduction.
www.icthubknowledgebase.org.uk/whatisrss

Common Craft have put together a video to explain in a more visual way.
www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

The Social Media Wikispace has lots of useful information including a guide to social media which gives definitions of the various tools that you could use.
socialmedia.wikispaces.com/A-Z+of+social+media

1.4 Quality of Information - Evaluating websites

There are billions of web pages out there, from all over the world. And anyone with a PC, a modem and access to a phone line can create web pages and make them available for us to stumble across while we’re searching for information.

This is also true of funding websites. The quality varies widely. The information is written by authors with different levels of knowledge, with different backgrounds, for different purposes. Some websites aren’t kept up to date. And some try to charge you for information that is available for free if you know where to look.

So how do we know what information is good and what isn’t? How do we know which websites to trust and which not to? There are a few questions you can ask of a website to assess the quality of the information:

1. Purpose - What is the website trying to achieve? Does it give you the information you need?

Find out the purpose of the site – what is it trying to do? For some, it is quite obvious. You would expect the website of the Big Lottery Fund to have information about the fund. But what about the website Fit4Funding? Are you sure you’d know what to expect to get from this website?

To find out more, look for a link that tells you about the purpose of the site or the organisation whose site it is. The link could be called ‘About us’ or ‘About this site’

The website address could also give you a clue. Look for the letters at the end of a website address to determine what type of website it is (and where it’s from).

Some of the most common ones are:

.org.uk - UK not-for-profit organisation
.gov.uk - UK government website, whether local, regional or national.
.ac.uk - UK academic institution
.co.uk - UK company
.com - US, or international company

For funding information, the best source of factual information is generally the funder’s own website, if they have one. However, this isn’t always true. Many European and UK government funding programmes are written in horrible jargon and are really hard to understand. Sometimes, a third party website or publication might have information on the programme that is easier to understand.

However, you should always be aware of what the aims of the third party website are: To inform? Or to persuade?

2. Author - Who has written and published the website? Do they have a vested interest? Does the author have the knowledge and experience to write with authority on the topic?

If you’re not sure who the author is, you can look for the copyright symbol ©, generally somewhere towards the bottom of the page, to tell you the person or organisation who published the website.

Or, you can use a Who Is search to find more information. For UK sites, go to www.nominet.org.uk, which is the internet registry for .uk internet addresses. You can enter a website domain (the bits of the website address after the www) into the search tool on this site and find information on who has registered the site

3. Content – balance and coverage - Does there seem to be any bias in the information? Does the website give you just the facts, or opinions too? And is there a good coverage of the subject?

The first question is less likely to be a problem for funding information that generally sticks to the facts and doesn’t include much opinion. However, you should still be aware that authors might have a vested interest in promoting a particular viewpoint. For example, a funder’s own website will promote its own funding programmes. A site like the Cleaner Safer Greener Communities Programme has information on environmental improvement work in urban areas. It is a government initiative, so the advice and information provided comes from a government angle.

You can use Google to expand your research to find similar sites that might have more information. In the search box, enter related:website address. For example, to find sites related to SYFAB, enter the text related:www.syfab.org.uk

4. Up-to-date - Is the website updated regularly enough for you to be sure you’re getting the most up-to-date information?

For funding websites, being up-to-date is a very important factor to consider. There is no point using a funding search website that suggests you should apply to funds that have closed, or funds that have changed criteria - the results are misleading and waste your time.

To get clues about when the site was last updated and how often it is updated you can check various things:

• Look for a ‘last updated’ date or a ‘page last modified’ date on the homepage
• Is there a ‘What’s new’ page that tells you what was updated and when?
• Is there a news section, or press releases that have dates on?
• Do the hyperlinks work? Sometimes, is a web page hasn’t been updated for a long time, the pages that it links to have been moved or removed, so the hyperlinks no longer work

BUT: a website that has the current date on the home page isn’t necessarily active and hasn’t necessarily been updated that day. Some websites automatically update to the current date even though no-one has changed anything on the site.

Further reading and resources:

The University of South Carolina has a useful set of brief online tutorials covering internet searching, search strategies amd evaluating the quality of online information.
www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/pages/bones/bones.shtml

Feedback! To keep my funders happy, i need to collect info on which groups are accessing these tutorials. So, firstly, please contact me to let me know your name, organisation and email address, and which tutorial(s) you’ve worked through. You can fill in the contact form below or email Danny directly to do this.

Next, comments and criticisms! Please let me know what you think of these tutorials. Did they make sense? Were they useful? What’s wrong with them? Please either send me a few comments along with your contact details using the contact form or emailing me. OR you can fill in a specific evaluation form (Click here to access the form) and send it back to me. If you are going to work through more than one tutorial you don’t need to contact me every time - just the once is fine!

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