Thursday, November 29, 2012 at 6:00PM I will be presenting on a different topic tomorrow so I wanted to share the slides from BAFA Arts Festival which took place earlier this month in London before I have a new set to show you. This is basically all you need to know about blogger engagement, few simple points to remember before you send your first email to them. I hope it's useful!
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 9:35PM It's child sponsorship week this week (#CSWeek on Twitter) so ActionAid are celebrating their work and engaging with on-line audiences to raise awareness around the work they do in this particular area of fundraising. I like this nonprofit simply because it opened up to bloggers and asked for our support in sharing their stories. I do not see this type of open work with bloggers often - I think it is still rare. So I am their strong advocate! I think the ladies working around blogger events do a great job of actually listening to our feedback and getting involved.
So this week you might see a few leading mum bloggers mentioning child sponsorship. I love the fact that in the UK we are celebrating so many causes. My son comes back from school almost every week with deeper understanding of help and support, compassion. This week I will talk to him about child sponsorship.
The reason I like ActionAid UK's work is their wise attitude to promotion - putting a face to the donation, which makes us feel all more personal about the help we are providing. Working with celebrities to raise awareness and exposure of their brand. And finally, most importantly tackling the issues of poverty at the local level, wisely investigating WHY kids are poor! Obviously our money will not go directly to one particular child but if it would - would it help? What we all want to see is that the developing areas will grow in their own independence, self-sustainability, education and with our help provide their kids with best possible conditions to shape their own future.
Here, in the UK, we sponsor a child. As symbolic as it sounds, we do get in touch with one particular member of the community and we get to build that bond which makes the relationship personal, emotional and ever so rewarding. So if you want to help, do donate or simply spread the word! Thank you!
Big hug to the fellow mum bloggers for getting involved:
And thank you to every single person who supports this cause! ActionAid team put together a nice infographics to feature all of you!
Sunday, June 24, 2012 at 9:55PM
I decided to travel to London for RegentTweet yesterday mainly to spend a day out in London with my son, but this programme for blogger ladies surprised me on many levels and ultimately kicked off a brainstorming session in my head too. There were few reasons why I got involved in the RegentTweet int he first place.
The Good
I do not like shopping and I am not a fan of high street myself, you see. However 2012 is a year of surprising experiences and I like to test my own boundaries. I think from this point of view the shop crawling experience was indeed one of a kind, in a positive sense! I did not know the architecture and layout of Regent Street. I was not aware of the range of shops and food and drink experiences in this rather central area of London. I know few good coffee shops in Oxford Circus area and that's about it! So when I finished listening to the presentations at the Apple store, registered at Swarovski lounge (after rather stylishly served coffee), and finished a Martini with geek ladies (so good to see some of you and meet some of you too!) I took my son for a game: finding a shop according to its address and name, looking inside of the shop for a QR code and finding out what the surprise present is all about. Can you imagine a better game for a 6 year old who loves to interact with people, search for answers and loves a bit of mystery?
The Bad
So together with my little Holmes we have found few shops, received few pretty goodie bags and observed the service in listed stores. I have to admit the entire day was carefully designed and planned and most of the stores briefed their staff to look out for ladies with RegentTweet badges so the process of claiming rewards was fairly easy. Few shops struggled with too many areas of service and it was a bit difficult to find out the right person to talk to (we did not manage to work out how to join the cupcake course in the end). I have also come across a shop which run out of goodie bags (funnily enough it's not a nice feeling to learn about it - despite of the fact we were really not fixed on the rewards themselves - so I have learned my lesson when planning blogger engagement never to set up the first come first get type of activities!). I also would like to see the central event Twitter account responding to questions on-line more often (my tweet on running late was left unanswered). But apart of those small observations the entire experience was rewarding, interesting, exciting but non-intrusive, and really well planned.
The Brilliant
I like the combination of socialising with geek ladies you know or really wish to meet together with notion of a game conducted both off-line as well as on-line. I like the kick off at Apple Store and central reference point at Swarovski. I also think that free drinks somehow make the day run more smoothly too;) On the top of the generally positive impressions as a blogger, geek but also social media consultant working in planning similar projects I really appreciate the fact that every single person involved in the process was open and positive about my son. I did not plan for him to join me originally but due to the series of circumstances he had to join me (and was also rewarded with a little bit of London sightseeing afterwards), but my son knows what I do for living and took RegentTweet as an introduction to what "mum does for living" which ultimately was fun!
I had a great time. He had a great time. We have both learned a lot. We both had fun. I loved to meet friends and make new connections. I have discovered few great places in central London and even I might actually go back and do some shopping one day! So I consider RegentTweet a brilliant idea and would like to thank the organisers and London Girl Geek Dinners for the invite!
Disclaimer: during the event I was offered small goodie bags (incl. two t-shirts and samples of cosmetics) but those did not affect my opinions in this posts whatsoever and I did my best to keep it as objective as possible.
