I was surprised to get quite a few replies from other people who had never heard of this functionality.

When it is switched on (and that’s the tricky part) you can target by gender, relationship status, education, interests, age, location and language.

Targeting your Facebook page posts

This is how to target posts on your Facebook page. This is NOT for posts on your personal profile and it is NOT paid for posts.

Edit the page and then select Manage Persmissions.

At the bottom of this screen is the option ‘Post privacy gating’. Tick this box.

Once you’ve turned this on you will get a compass icon in your page post boxes.

Click the icon to add your targeting options.

Photo by Giuli-O

As you may know I’m part way through my PTLLS course, which focusses on teaching approaches for adult learners.

As part of the course I have to do a 15 minute micro-teach.

I’ve been struggling a bit with knowing what to do in that session.

We won’t have access to computers so I can’t cover any of the things I’d normally do in my workshops and I’m not sure how much I could realistically teach in that time.

The one idea I have had is to do something around licensing of content.

It’s important for (potential) teachers to know what they can and can’t use as resources in the classroom and I don’t think many people really understand it.

Now that I know the overall theme I need to come up with a specific learning objective.

That’s where you come in. What do you think is a realistic outcome for a 15 minute session?

I plan to simplify the options into Copyrighted material, Public domain material and ‘Creative Commons’ material (as a shorthand for something that’s open to use, possibly with some restrictions.)

I need to think about how to structure the timings but I can probably only fit in one exercise, which could be to match statements to their licence type.

For example “Photo can be used in handouts as long as you include the name of the photographer.” That will match to “Creative Commons”.

Information about which websites they could use will probably be in a handout.

I would appreciate any thoughts you guys have on this.

On a board near the entrance was information about the Abbey’s iPhone app.

It’s a shame that the app is only for iPhones, as an Android gal I couldn’t test it. I’m also not convinced it would be easy to download as the phone reception in Dorchester was pretty dreadful. That said, I applaud their effort, full marks.

What I really wanted to share with you was this, the grave of Mrs Sarah Fletcher who “sunk and died a Martyr to Excessive Sensibility” in 1799. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.

Text:

Reader!
If thou hast a Heart famed for Tenderness and Pity, Contemplate this spot.
In which are deposited the Remains of a Young Lady, whose artless Beauty, innocence of Mind and gentle Manners once obtained her the Love and Esteem of all who knew her. But when Nerves were too delicately spun to bear the rude Shakes and Jostlings which we meet in this transitory World, Nature gave way. She sunk and died a Martyr to Excessive Sensibility.
Mrs Sarah Fletcher
Wife of Captain Fletcher departed this Life at the Village of Clifton on the 7th of June 1799.
In the 29th year of her Age.
May her Soul meet that Peace in Heaven which this earth denied her.

*************************************

[ETA - Thanks to Maurice Mcleod for finding this online about the unfortunate life of Sarah Fletcher, and thanks to Pete Read for doing the initial research:

We learn more from “Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865″ by Helen Small. She quotes Jackson’s Oxford Journal of Saturday 15 June 1799 as follows:

On Saturday last, an Inquest was taken at Clifton, in this county, before R. Buckland, Gent. one of his Majesty’s Coroners, on the body of Mrs. Sarah Fletcher. This lady put an end to her existence by hanging herself with her pocket handkerchief, which she fastened to a piece of small cord, and affixed it to the curtain rod of the bedstead in the room in which she usually slept. After a full investigation of the previous conduct of the deceased, and the derangement of her mind appearing very evident from the testimony of the gentleman at whose house this unfortunate affair happened, as well as from many other circumstances, the jury, without hesitation, found a Verdict – Lunacy. The husband of this unfortunate lady is an officer in the Navy, and is now on his passage to the East Indies.

Furthermore, she quotes from a local pamphlet:

Sarah Fletcher (one of the Fletchers of Saltoun) lived at Clifton Hampden – not far from here. Captain Fletcher was in the Navy, and, following the popular tradition of the sea, he was not only inconstant, but unfaithful. He actually proposed marriage to a wealthy heiress living some distance away, and he was on the point of committing bigamy when Mrs Fletcher was warned at the last moment – she had only just time to reach the church to stop the ceremony. ‘It is not difficult to imagine the scene which followed . . . Captain Fletcher literally ran away, made for London, and sailed for the East Indies. The unwedded bride returned home with her parents, and Sarah Fletcher drove back to Clifton Hampden and hanged herself in her bedroom fasten­ing her pocket handkerchief to a piece of cord which she fixed to the curtain rod of her bedstead.

Apparently there’s even a ghost!

Yesterday it emerged that the FSID was changing its name to The Lullaby Trust. As they say on their website “‘The Lullaby Trust’ communicates warmth, trust and compassion. It is a simple name which is easy to remember and illustrates our commitment to promoting safer sleep for babies to every family.”

To tie in with the re-brand, parent bloggers were asked to write their own lullaby and blog about it.

It was such a great idea and the rate at which tweets about the #lullabytrust were appearing in my timeline shows what a success it was.

Charity campaigns that work with bloggers can have a great impact, Damien Clarkson has already written some top tips for blogger effective outreach.

As Damien says “Bloggers tend to be early adopters; they are essentially the cool kids at school and what they like and support other people soon do as well.”

In the case of parent bloggers, they’re incredibly passionate about issues affecting their children, especially if they’ve been affected by something as devastating as sudden infant death.

Here are just a few of the tweets that were posted yesterday:

Look what love and friendship can do x edspire.co.uk/year_2013/04/0… Thank you to everyone who has supported us today x #lullabytrust #matildamae—
Jennie Edspire (@Edspire) April 10, 2013

Im running #brightonmarathon in memory of my sister Pls support me donate to #lullabytrust for Sudden Infant Death.RT justgiving.com/poundingPs—
Maz (@MaryannPenfold) April 01, 2013

I want to say thank you again to everyone who has linked up for the #lullabytrust today. I am reading through tears #matildamae Thank you—
Jennie Edspire (@Edspire) April 10, 2013

New blog post to support @LullabyTrust and @Edspire #lullabytrust greatbritishfamily.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/the… sorry I'm a day late.—
Great British family (@GBfamilyblog) April 11, 2013

Good Morning. An Afterword… allatseascotland.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/an-aft… #lullabyTrust #MatildaMae #ProudToBeABlogger #NewBlogPost—
Helen Braid (@EllieAllAtSea) April 11, 2013

https://twitter.com/MerrilyMe/status/322105488013684737

A lullaby thehandmademum.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/lullab… #lullabytrust @LullabyTrust—
TheHandmadeMum (@DaniAskins) April 10, 2013

I want to say thank you again to everyone who has linked up for the #lullabytrust today. I am reading through tears #matildamae Thank you—
Jennie Edspire (@Edspire) April 10, 2013

The Lullaby Trust offer support to anyone affected by the sudden and unexpected death of a baby or young toddler. You can find out about their services at http://www.lullabytrust.org.uk.

Photo from Flickr by pgcummings

I’m 2/7 of the way through my PTLLS course now and it’s time for the first assignment.

Eek!

It’s a mildly terrifying idea, I’m not sure I’ve ever written a proper essay before. I did science subjects for A-Level and then maths at university. The only letters there were part of complex equations and proofs.

One part of the course that hasn’t really been a struggle are the reflective learning journals. We have to write one for every session reflecting on what we’ve done and learned and what it means for our teaching. For me it’s just like a blog post but with more of a structure

So, I’d better crack on. It’s better to just do it than write a blog post about how terrified you are of it.

Fingers crossed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I’m sure there are already lots of you that know, use and love Doodle but there are lots and lots who don’t and I want to do what I can to spread the Doodle word!

What is Doodle?

Doodle is an online tool that revolutionises the way you schedule meetings.

It’s best explained by looking at two different scenarios…

• Old scenario: You pick out 10 possible days and times that you can make a meeting. You write an email with the possible dates and send it to your five colleagues (some of who aren’t on the same IT system). Two days of reply-all emails come your way as people two and fro about when they can and can’t make. One of your colleagues thinks someone else should attend so forwards the email on, they are left out of the reply all loop and don’t realise that a couple more possibilities have been suggested. You get annoyed and just walk round to each person’s desk and look at their diary with them. Arrrrgh!
• New scenario with Doodle: You create a poll in doodle that lists all of the possible dates and times you can do. You get an email link to send around to everyone. They all fill in the poll online and you can see clearly there’s one day and time that everyone can do so you call to confirm. Easy.

How can Doodle be of use to me and my charity?

Doodle is not an earth-shattering money saver, it’s not going totally revolutionise the workplace but I guarantee that as soon as you start to use it in your office, everyone will be amazed at how much easier it makes things, they always are.

You really notice how easy it makes things when you want to schedule a meeting with people outside of your organisation, who don’t see your shared calendar.

If ever I run a workshop on new technologies Doodle is the one tool that continues to amaze.

How do I get started?

Using Doodle is an absolute doddle (sorry).

1. Firstly sign up to a free account so you can administer your polls at www.doodle.com.
2. If you want you can link Doodle to your own Outlook, Gmail or other calendar. The benefit of doing that is that when you come to select options a bit later, you see you calendar in front of you.
   
3. Once you’re logged in, click on the big ‘Schedule an event’ button.
4. The first screen is where you include information about the event. The more you put in here the less people will bug you for details.
5. The next thing you need to do is select the dates. If you’ve connected your calendar then Doodle will show your own meetings here rather than just a basic month view.
6. Once the dates are set, pick out some times. It’s totally up to you whether you use specific (15:00) or general terms (morning).
7. Once you’ve finalised your poll you can choose to either get a link that you send around or add all of the email addresses and get Doodle to email it out for you.
8. As people complete the poll you’ll get a notification email. This can be turned off in the settings.
9. If someone can’t make any of the dates and wants to suggest an alternative then they can leave a comment on the poll.
10. It’s easy to see what the best date is from within the poll as it adds up all of the responses.

MeetMe is another free tool from Doodle that allows you to create a public facing calendar – showing slots that you’re available – so people can request to meet with you. This might be useful if you want to arrange a yearly 1-1 meeting with each of your trustees or other stakeholders from outside the organisation.

BookMe is a paid for service that allows people to book onto your services online. There is a charge but you can try it for free for 30 days.

How do you manage the booking of meetings and events in your organisation? Are there any other tools you’d like to share?

What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is favourites for the 21st century. It’s a useful way of saving information you find on the web in a place you can access from anywhere and in a format that encourages sharing.

Favourites were a really handy tool when we first started to use the internet. Every time you came across a web nugget you could add it to your favourites for easy access the next time you wanted it.

The problem with favourites though is that it assumes a very static use of the web; one person on the same computer every day.

Now we’re more familiar with using the web on the move; on our phone, on a tablet, on a laptop, in a café, hot-desking in someone’s office… but probably not the computer you were using yesterday.

This makes the idea of favourites redundant. What we really want it to be able to access our favourite sites or useful resources from any device and at any time. That’s social bookmarking.

How can social bookmarking be of use to me and my charity?

• Information you need at the touch of a button – As long as you are connected to the internet then you can access your links. From any device at any time.
• Find what you need quickly and easily – By using tags to describe the links you save, even if you can’t remember exactly what the list was called, you can retrieve it quickly.
• Share useful information easily with others – Because you’re saving your links online it makes it a lot easier to share them with others. There are even ways to automate this process, so if you save links that would be particularly useful for your trustees to see it can be sent straight to them. I look at this at the end of the post.
• Create a library of online information for your organisation or cause – You could use social bookmarking as a way to signpost your service users to relevant information online, use tags to categorise the links.

If you’re going to do your job well then you need to be able to access the right information quickly, and that’s exactly what social bookmarking is perfect for.

How do I get started?

• You’ll need an account with a social networking site. I use Delicious, just because it was one of very few when I first started but there are others out there.
• (I’m going to focus on Delicious as that’s what I use) To make it really easy to use, add an Add to Delicious button to your internet browser. This will make it easy to save links with one click.
• Add link – You don’t have to use the button, you can just go to the Delicious site, log in and then add a link from there.
• Once you’ve added the link you’ll be able to put in more detail.
• Link title: This will fill in automatically based on how the web page is set up but you can edit it to make it easier to refer to next time.
• Your comment: This is your place for making any notes about the link that will help you in the future; where you heard about it, why you think it will be useful etc.
• Tags: These are keywords that you can use to describe your link. Once you’ve used a tag once it will be suggested when saving other links. You’ll be able to see a list of all your links to find others tagged with the same keywords. Make sure that your tags are descriptive so they’ll mean something in a month or years time. If you were saving a link to the match report of Liverpool v Manchester Utd you might use the tags; Liverpool, ManU, result, 2012/2013, home. It’s worth checking if the site you’re using allows spaces in tags, Delicious does.
• Public/ private: It’s up to you whether your links are public or private. To get the most from the social side of a tool like this you should aim for having most of them as public but if you are saving information about a surprise birthday present or researching a medical condition, for example, it’s easy to make them private.
• Tag bundles – As well as using tags you can create a bundle to group together sets of links. You might want to do this for the key areas of your work, or one of for each issue you deal with.
• Share – The great thing about social bookmarking is the social side. If other people you know are using Delicous (for example) then you can include a tag for:louisebrown to send it to them.
• Discover – The Discover Delicious page shows what popular links people are saving right now, you can even search to see if other people are using the same tags as you. This can bring up information you didn’t even know existed.

Ways to link your social bookmarking site to other online tools:

• Twitter – If you use Twitter then you can use a tool like Packrati.us to save your tweets automatically to social bookmarking sites. It’s up to you how you set this up, it could be all links you tweet, all that you favourite or when you use a specific hashtag.
• IFTTT – You can set up IFTTT alerts that will carry out actions such as sending a text, an email, adding to a Google doc, sending a tweet… whatever you want when you save a bookmark with a particular tag. I wrote about how I though this could help to take the pain out of reporting to trustees.
• Pinterest – You could use Pinterest as your main tool for bookmarking, in a very visual way. The only constraint is that your online resources will need to contain an image for you to save it to Pinterest.
• Website - If you are using WordPress for your website then there are Delicious plugins that allow you to easily show your bookmarks. There are also more techie things you can do with the Delicious API.

Do you use social bookmarking in your work? Are there any other tips you can add?

Other things I’ve written about social bookmarking:

• Social media taking the pain out of reporting to trustees (2012)
• Creating link resources using Delicious stacks (2012) – unfortunately you can’t create stacks any more, you can still have tag bundles.
• Sifting the online wheat from the chaff (2012)
• Beginners guide to social bookmarking (2007)
• del.icio.us (2007) – this was the old name before Delicious removed all the dots

Beautiful Matilda Mae

Last week was one I don’t want to revisit for a while. Thursday was spent with two close friends as they held a funeral for their beautiful baby girl Matilda Mae. Baby Tilda died while she was sleeping just a month ago, she was 9 months old.

Matilda Mae’s mum Jennie is a prolific blogger. Since she was first pregnant with her twins she has been sharing what it’s like to be pregnant, the experience of parenting premature babies, bringing them up, playing with them and then all over again when baby Tilda came along.

Jennie has got an incredible amount of help and support from the online world, and given back the same and more.

When it came to preparing what I’m sure was the most difficult day of her life, Jennie wanted to make sure the friends she had made through her blog were included and what they mean to each other was reflected.

The service was just lovely, it was a true celebration of Matilda Mae’s life. Susanne (AKA @Ghostwritermumm) and Heather (AKA @SAHMlovingit), both bloggers who I’m not sure had even met Jennie in real life before, read incredibly moving pieces about Jennie and Matilda and what their lives and experiences meant to them. They included other words from bloggers who couldn’t be there and I’m sure they could have read a lot more.

In the pub later, there was a Twitter wall showing all of the love and wishes from tweeters across the globe. For a while #matildamae was trending, a true social media baby. People changed their avatar to a special star picture, making Twitter twinkle for the day.

Jennie’s reason for including these social media elements in the day was to show her non-blogging friends and family just what strength, support, help and love she has got from the network. It was bloggers that rallied round to make sure Jennie and her husband looked after themselves in the horrible weeks following Matilda’s death. They arranged for Graze boxes and other food to be delivered, to keep up their strength for their other children.

An older man I sat next to in the pub – who I took to be a relative – asked me about Twitter and how the Twitter wall was working and then acknowledged that actually, blogging was pretty good. He admitted to only every having read negative stories in the press. I think that’s exactly what Jennie wanted.

Matilda Mae’s impact in the world, in just 9 short months, has already been incredible. As well as practical help and support the blog has given other parents in that time, over £3000 has been raised in her memory for the charity Bliss, and hundreds of people are already signed up to walk a Mile for Matilda for the charity FSID.

The connections you make with people online can be incredibly powerful and make a real difference. I am sure that Matilda Mae will continue to inspire for a long time to come.

I’m feeling ridiculously nervous about growing vegetables because I know there’s so much to learn and so many factors to get right. Have I chosen the right beds for things? Will they have enough direct sunlight? Will they have enough shade? Do they need extra nitrogen in the soil? Do they have enough nitrogen already? Aaaarrrgghhh!

I’m well aware that there are people in their 70s, 80s, 90s who still feel like they’re learning about growing vegetables, but I want to get it all right, now! We had such a disastrous year last year because of the rain, or maybe because of the old seeds I used, or maybe because I was doing things wrong, I’d love it if this year was a bit more successful.

I keep on reading books and websites about growing vegetables and they all say something slightly different and it’s making my heard hurt. Luckily Gardeners’ World starts again this week, Monty will tell me what I need to do.

The seeds in my picture are from The Real Seed Catalogue. One of the main reasons I chose to buy from them is the effort they put into encouraging people to collect their own seeds. The order came with a guide to collecting seeds from all of our vegetables so we’ll be well stocked next year, leaving some money to try out something new from the catalogue. Win win.

Thanks to Damien Clarkson for recommending The Real Seed Catalogue in the first place.

There are so many great little online tools out there that can make a big difference to the way we work.

In the first of – what I hope will be – a regular series of blog posts I’m going to look at Google Alerts and how they can be used by charities.

What are Google Alerts?

To start at the beginning, “Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results – such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs – that match your search term.”

You should assume that every piece of information you need to know – sector updates, government policy, funding programmes, campaign news – is firstly being published online. If you were able to get hold of this information as soon as it was made available, just think of the advantage your organisation would have over others.

Using Google Alerts well could save you money as it removes the need to subscribe to paid for news services.

Once Google Alerts are set up they can be left to their own devices, allowing you to get on with the work that really matters.

I would call using a tool like Google Alerts “listening” on the web, and I’ve written about how important I think that is elsewhere on the site.

How can our organisation use Google Alerts?

Google Alerts is a tool that will notify you about information on the web as soon as it appears and as such is relevant for every member of staff.

Some ways you could use Google Alerts include:

• As a substitute for newspaper cuttings. Set up an alert for the name of your organisation to find out when it has been mentioned.
• To follow the progress of your campaign. Set up an alert for the name of your campaign to find people writing about it or doing their bit.
• To keep track of a piece of policy. Set up an alert for the name of the policy or paper, restricting it to the relevant government department website if appropriate (see tips below).
• Keep up to date with developments and discussions in your sector. Set up an alert for the medical condition name, local area or sector name.
• Monitor your competitors. Set up an alert with the names of other organisations or services.

Setting up your Google Alerts

Google Alerts form

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts and start filling in the Alerts form.
2. Search query: This is where you type in your search, just think about what you would put in a normal Google search. There are tips for being smarter with your search below.
3. Result type: You can specify what you want your search results to show; Everything, News, Blogs, Video, Discussions or Books. Unless you know exactly what you are searching for it’s worth setting this to Everything initially.
4. How often: You can decide how often you get your alert; As-it-happens, Once a day, Once a week. As-it-happens is useful if you want to know as soon as a funding programme is opened or a paper is published. Once a week is probably a better setting if you’re just searching for general terms. Start with Once a day and make a decision about whether you want your alerts to be more or less frequent.
5. How many: You have the option to choose between ‘Only the best results’ or ‘All results’. When you start out with your alerts it might be best to set this to ‘All results’. If you find you’re getting too many results back then you can change this.
6. Your email: This is where your alert will be sent to. If you already have a Google account and are logged in this box will be pre-filled with your address. If you don’t have a Google account then you’ll be sent a confirmation email to your chosen address.
7. Review your alerts: After a week or so of getting alerts review the information you’re getting. If you haven’t received anything then perhaps your search criteria is too narrow. If you have been totally inundated with alerts then it might be worth narrowing your criteria. Have a look at the search tips below. If your search topic suddenly hits the headlines you might also find you need to review your alerts. This is where having a Google account comes in useful as it’s easier to log in and manage your settings.
8. Share what you find. There’s no point keeping all of this information to yourself, share it with colleagues.

Tips for perfecting your search

If you’ve never really looked into setting up smart searches then you might be surprised by how much you can do to refine your results.

Here are some tips:

• Use “quotes” to group together words or specify spelling, for example “National Trust” or “colour” (to remove American spellings from results)
• Exclude terms using a -, for example Walkers -crisps
• Search just specific websites using site:communities.gov.uk, this will just search the DCLG website
• Exclude specific websites from your search using -site:bbc.co.uk, this will search all sites, except the BBC. This is useful if you notice your alerts are returning lots of irrelevant results from a particular site
• Search for more than one term by using OR. This can be useful if people use different terms to describe the same organisation or issue, for example “London 2012″ or “Olympics 2012″ or “London Olympics”.

Do you use Google Alerts in your work? Are there any other tips you can add?