Institute of Fundraising IT Special Interest Group Conference

or the IOFITSIG conference.

(One aside: on the train up I noticed that hardly anyone had a tie on, just suits and open necked collared shirts. As I'm not a regular commuter I must have missed the memo saying that we don't have to wear a tie.)

I found this very stimulating. Not being a fundraiser I found the initial session from Alan Clayton of Cascaid (that's the agency, not the careers people) very interesting.

(Update: I missed out the Social Media Game. That link is about the session that I went to.)

I went to a session which had someone from Comic Relief. Obviously that's very big scale stuff, but some of it is applicable to even an organisation like us. For example, we've been getting people to run events recently.

"A Best Practice Framework for Managing a Big, Sophisticated Fundraising Information System" was about a Raiser's Edge implementation at Help the Aged. Much bigger than us, but good lessons to learn.

"Social Media feel the fear and do it anyway" gave me my to do list to take to the boss.

As an aside, it's interesting that the Fundraisers have their IT bit. The Charity Finance people have their IT bit. Where are the Charity IT people? There's CITRA, which is owned by several organisations, including those too. However their website has events from 2004 and 2005 on it, and nothing in the future, so that doesn't inspire confidence.