Last week, CharityInsight.com played host to an online debate about using social media to benefit non-profit organisations. It asked five sets of questions on behalf of charities that are all six’s and seven’s about the social web. Our very own Rachel Beer was one of the panellists.

Last week I sent myself on a journey for marketing knowledge and insights at the Marketing Week Live Exhibition 2011. I caught two and a half presentations, grasped some freebies and netted some valuable insight about data in marketing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was lucky enough to grab some rare time with Rebekah to catch up over a sushi dinner recently (sadly no ikura – one of our joint favourite things – but otherwise very good indeed).