Ash shows that Karma is a two-way street

Ashley Rosshandler of Karma Currency opened his presentation at Connecting Up 2008
with a joke about chooks but followed through with a peck at the gift wrapped prize he'd won as Top Innovator in the nonprofit IT sector at the Australian Community ICT Awards.
Ash quickly recycled his food and wrappings around the room (hmm... kept the wine). Point taken, Ash - we'll make sure it doesn't happen again :-)

Climate change? Call it climate chaos

In Brisbane at the Connecting Up conference. What an awesome job Doug Jacquier and his team have done. There is a huge buzz in the air and the first day wrapup was standing room only to hear Richard Neville talk about the future. The comment that sticks in my head is “don’t call it ‘climate change’ – it sounds like a holiday in the Bahamas”.

Australian charities look to the Facebook generation for donations and members

According to Oxfam, the Environmental Defense Fund, Community Information Strategies Australia (CISA), DonorTec and hundreds of other nonprofit organizations surveyed, the number of people who open or respond to e-mail messages is falling, threatening this previously powerful and low-cost marketing tool for nonprofits.

A new study shows that the percentage of people who opened messages from the charities fell from 21.3 percent in 2006 to 17.6 percent in 2007, while the percentage of recipients who clicked through to a web link included in the messages decreased from 4.9 percent to 3.8 percent. But surprisingly the amount of money that the groups raised over the Internet (by any means) increased 19 percent from 2006 to 2007.

The message is clear, says CISA CEO Doug Jacquier, organiser of the Australian national Connecting Up conference, charities need to start using the social web to stay up with changing habits of giving. See "Australian charities turn to Facebook generation for survival" for the views of Doug and leading nonprofit social media guru Beth Kanter.