Latest Charity Awareness Monitor also indicates that persistent or obtrusive fundraising puts donors off

The proportion of people who think charities work professionally has increased by more than a sixth over the past three years, according to a survey.

Earlier this afternoon, as I stood waiting in front of a cashpoint, a young guy in his 20s thrust a blood-covered arm under my nose and asked for a couple of quid. It was a shocking sight on a raw winter’s day and, before I could help it, I had fumbled the money into his hand.

I took part in two social media panels today at the Women’s Resource Centre’s Facing Our Future Conference at the Cass Business School, alongside Fiona McLaren from Amnesty UK and @BeckyPants, founder of whomadeyourpants – a cooperative in Southampton, ‘empowering marginalised women and making utterly splendid pants’.

If you’re a Facebook user – which, if you’re reading this, in all likelihood you are! – then you probably noticed lots of you friends changing their profile picture to a cartoon character over the weekend and wondered what it was all about.

We were pretty excited when we discovered, a little while back via Twitter, that one of our campaigns had been nominated for a new social media award.

Simon and I were talking the other day about fashions in web design and whether people just copied off each others’ sites or whether there are best practices emerging. So I thought that it would be a good idea to have a history of charity homepages, starting from now.

Whilst looking for one of my presentations on Slideshare to send to someone just now, I stumbled across this collaborative slide deck I contributed to earlier in the year, on trends in charity communications over the next ten years, which was curated by our friends at Bright One and CharityComms.

It’s the last day today that NCVO members can submit their questions to me, via the NCVO website, on online fundraising. I’m intrigued to find out what they’re going to be!

Those nice people at Blackbaud, makers of Adam’s favourite database, The Raiser’s Edge, have published what they call ‘The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving’ based on data they have collected from 1,364 nonprofit organisations in the US.

Hot on the heels of Simon and Anna’s presentation last week, and post yesterday, here’s the presentation I gave at NCVO’s seminar, ‘Campaigning Futures: What will campaigning look like in in 5 year’s time’:

I was sent a link to this article yesterday by a friend (who works as a fundraising consultant). She asked me what I thought about it ‘from a data perspective’. Given that the sample was so small, did I think it was indicative of anything useful to know?

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?

YouthNet’s online guide to life, TheSite.org, is a trusted source of information, advice and guidance on whole plethora of issues, ranging from relationships and sex, to the law and health.

At youth mobility charity Whizz-Kidz we’ve been steadily increasing our social media and real-time web use over the last 18 months; trying and testing different platforms for different communications with our supporters and users.

This coming Thursday is the next NFPtweetup, taking place at JustGiving’s new offices. As part of a blog series leading up to the event, I was asked to share some thoughts on the event, especially for those coming along for the first time that may not know what to expect.

Dogs Trust, as most of you know, are sometimes heralded as the ‘best practice’ for NFP social media, and while we love that tag there was always a missing element for us that niggled – we never raised any money.

Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation have been working together to raise awareness of the dangers of Active Fat. The fat that makes up your love handles – actually, I won’t assume that you have love handles, that would be rude…

So, just what is on the horizon for us in 2010?

There is of course going to be an election (finally!). Some say it will be as early as March, others that Brown will push it until the last minute in May.

These days, charities are getting a lot of encouragement to have a video presence on the web. Good thing, too.

YouTube, now the world’s second largest search engine, runs an excellent service for non-profits – with the ability to put links in your video that go directly to your website.