Welcome to the first of a new weekly blog from beautiful world; beautiful bytes, a roundup of third sector digital news. All in one easy to swallow post.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The other day I got pleasant surprise in the form of an email from Sofii – a website set up by Ken Burnett as “The Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration.”

We had a fantastic 6th NFPtweetup at Breast Cancer Care last Thursday (check our posterous for the briefest summary). So, before the night’s memories and #NFPtweetup mentions fade, I thought I’d try to capture the essence of it here.