For our final blog post, we hear from Jonathan Waddingham with highlights from past NFPtweetup events.

With the seventh NFPtweetup upon us, you should be well on your way to knowing what to expect. But how did it come about, and what are the highlights you may have missed?

At the risk of navel-gazing, we’ve already done a “story so far” presentation (from November 2009) so you can see that to find out how it all started back in November 2008. But if you look at the first ever collaborative slideshow (we used to get everyone coming to send in a slide on a certain topic) it’s funny how some of the themes are still relevant today:

But that’s no surprise really – if you’re on Twitter then you’re communicating with people and are this involved in communications (to a greater or lesser degree). So you need to know who’s in control, what your message is, and what the goal is. The only thing that’s changed over the last couple of years is that there are more examples of charities doing these things well on Twitter (and other platforms).

This is what I find really interesting about the tweetups – hearing stories from the people who are actually making things happen, and them sharing their advice. There’s no self-promotion or agenda, no question is too simple or stupid, everyone’s very open and honest about their success and failures. And as much as we all like to communicate online, there’s no substitute for meeting people in real life (or IRL if you like) and putting a face to the avatar.

We’re proud at JustGiving to have supported the tweetup for the last two years, as I think so many people have taken away so much from all of the events. And they don’t happen by accident – it takes a lot of time and effort to organise the venue, speakers and agenda. So this time we’re even more excited than normal to support the event at our new office. I only hope it’s big enough for all you NFPtweeters!

But I’ll leave you with probably my favourite collaborative slideshow so far, on “finding your Twitter voice”. I think it’s the hardest thing to crack when you first join Twitter, and in these 18 slides, there are some fantastic examples of people, organisations and charities who manage to communicate their mission, calls to action and their personality in just 140 characters.