Some years ago, I found myself newly installed as one of two creative directors hired by the fundraising agency, Cascaid. It had recently moved from Reading to London and was determined to become a major player on the London scene (which it did).

Highlights from the live question and answer panel for Guardian voluntary sector network. Topics included internal challenges with social media, asking for celebrity tweets, getting started with social media and integrating social media into other areas of work.

This week’s beautiful bytes looks at how the launch of JustTextGiving, Likester and Unity could impact the sector and looks at an innovative use of Groupon for clever crowdsourcing.

I was reminiscing the other day about the joy of writing and receiving letters and my friend lamented that people send emails nowadays. Well that seemed pretty obvious – yeah, I suppose they do.But just looking at my personal email inbox today I can’t find any messages from people I know; every single one is a marketing message of some description.

Highlights from the live question and answer panel for Guardian voluntary sector network. The panel answered questions on how your organisation can best use social media to raise awareness. An overview of the Q&A in the most general sense sees panellists urging organisations to use a simple, integrative to approach to social media.

The old volume vs value debate is always ongoing and is as pertinent as ever with the arrival, and spread, of social media. But the way people communicate has changed, the tools we have are different, and so the debate has moved on…

Google encroaches on Facebook and Foursquare turf, pressure increases for Apple to allow in-app donations and getting buy-in for development of your online strategy

Swipegood makes donating even easier, Google updates offering to non-profits, check-in to Facebook events and Twitter may be soon to roll out brand pages

  I read this article from Third Sector magazine about Michael Naidu of Mencap, who is also vice-chair of the PFRA, asking that attrition rates from all channels of fundraising be published.  Currently it is only face to face (F2F) fundraising that reports attrition levels (I’m guessing this also includes door to door). I agree [...]

Google had a good idea about a year ago with a Gmail Labs feature called Mail Goggles, which required you to solve math problems in order to respond to email. If you failed to answer the math problems correctly, no email for you. Perhaps community users – especially those of, say, the Red Cross – need a pair of Twitter Goggles. Earlier tonight, someone who updated the Red Cross’ official Twitter account was apparently getting “slizzerd”.

This is a useful graph to add some context if you have not yet tried Facebook advertising for your charity or nonprofit – although most charities I’ve come across have put a toe in the water at least by now, and many have found Facebook ads can work well for them.

Amid the doom and gloom of spending cuts and rising unemployment, I want to focus this week’s beautiful bytes on reasons to be optimistic for the charity sector in 2011:

We’re finally through the 12 days of Christmas and only have 50 shopping weeks until the next one. For now, we can play with all the tasty information we got this Christmas!

Happy New Year everyone – welcome to 2011! I hope you all had a great break full of overindulgence – I think my Christmas dinner has just about settled. Time for some tech news I think!

Cash machines should automatically give customers an option of donating to charity, the coalition proposes tomorrow in a green paper designed to define the elusive “big society” in Britain.

Third Sector reported yesterday on some recently published findings by nfpSynergy (I’ve clipped the article on my Posterous), which prompted me to ponder on these points in particular: