Well here we are in February already. I really must attack my blog more often!
January was a relatively quiet month, due largely of course to the grand old British weather. Although we managed to keep the FAV Centre open, the snow meant that a few of our students weren't able to get to us, and two of the first outreach sessions of the year also had to be cancelled. It was well worth us keeping open though as otherwise I would have missed a call from a lovely lady at Marks and Spencer, telling me that we had won a £1,000 hamper in a Facebook competition that someone had nominated us for!
Social Networking, of course, is the 'buzz word' of the moment. Everyone is Facebooking, tweeting, reuniting with friends, blogging, linking in and such like. But new forms of social media are just like any other kind of networking; what you get out of it depends largely on how much effort you put into it, and how targeted that effort is. I have learned this lesson recently from our Twitter account. There are two basic formats in which I tweet; 'professional' tweets which provide information to other professionals and interested parties in the field of speech and language assistance, or which inform people of forthcoming fundraising events and latest news. The other tweets are more localised between myself as an individual and local networking contacts; people who I can now call friends. Building a rapport with local people is just as important to us as an organisation as the 'professional' stuff; through our local friends we have gained a Trustee, found people to help us with computer set ups, help with databases and found support for our events. However, I am sure that the many charities and professional organisations that follow us from all over the world don't really want to hear the random banter that occurs, especially later on in the evening sometimes. This fact was beginning to be proven by a slow but sure drop off of followers, and we don't want anyone to be put off as we have loads of really useful stuff to say! So, a couple of weeks ago I reincarnated the personal Twitter account that I set up about a year ago and then never used, and I'm in the process of directing people to follow my more casual tweets there.
I wanted to chat a little further about the phrase 'communication', especially about how we communicate here at FAV. In the past year we have changed and expanded what we do here, and have changed the reference of 'helping people without speech' to 'helping people communicate'. This change of ethos came about because Becky and myself realised that our activities encompass more of a generic 'communication' rather than specific 'speech' angle. It is true that our core function and the main purpose of our organisation is assist with augmentative and alternative forms of communication (AAC). This will never cease to be our main purpose, and will continue to be a service that is provided free of charge to children and adults alike. But to provide this service costs money. Much of the equipment can be sourced from grants, but staffing the centre, administration, insuring the library equipment and providing the outreach service is not so easy to attract funding for. And as the demand for our totally unique service increases as our mission becomes more well known, so do the running costs asscoaiated with it. Providing ICT and ASDAN courses to people with learning and/or communication difficulties helps those people to communicate also. It may not be in the sense that they cannot speak, but an autistic person who cannot hold a conversation face to face with anyone may be able to communicate via email, Facebook etc because non-verbal communication via a piece of technology does not have the same threat factor for them as a real person. They are being enabled to communicate on the same basis as someone who trials a communication aid; it's just that the method is different. The teaching work that we do with our students at FAV enriches their lives, and no one else provides this service on such a specialised and individual basis. In addition to this, our learning programmes also bring an income to the organisation which now goes a long way to meeting the running costs of the centre and the outreach. It's diversification, pure and simple. Our educational programmes are the iPod Nano to our augmentative and alternative communication iPod, and I use this analogy specifically as these are two products which do the same thing but in slightly different ways, and both have a high demand. Life in the Third Sector can be tough, especially in a compromised economic climate. It is even tougher if you are reliant on people coming to give you money. Diversifying and opening charity shops, running lotteries, running events and providing other chargeable services enables many charities to carry on providing the core functions that they feel so passionate about, and the extra services that we offer at FAV to enable us to work towards sustainability have the added bonus that they also enable us to help many more groups of people to enrich their lives by different forms of communication.
Running a smaller charity is akin to running a small business, but with the added features of additional stakeholders (in the form of Trustees) and additional regulation from the Charity Commission. Trustees are our unpaid non-executive directors and play a big part in the life of the organisation. Like non-executive directors in the private sector, they are not usually involved in the day-to-day nitty gritty of the organisation but are expected to ratify major decisions that affect the running of it. Being a Registered Charity means additional red tape (and of course additional time consumed meeting reporting requirements), on top of all of the Companies House reporting that a small limited company would be required to produce. There is also, of course, the requirement set down by our Constitution and Charity Commission rules that we must keep six months operational funding in reserves. I certainly don't know of many small businesses that have the luxury of a buffer amounting to six month's overheads sitting in the bank, especially not in recent years. Many are just hoping to be able to trade out of the recession by the skin of their teeth. But this is an additional burden that we are required to deal with and must financially plan for. So you see, the more that we can do to become self-sustainable, without compromising our mission and values, the better position we will be in to survive and evolve. We might even open that charity shop one day........
On the subject of events, we recently took some of our ICT and ASDAN students on a trip out for the evening to see the world famous Michael Jackson impersonator, Navi. Minibus, three course meal and a free bar ensured that everyone had a great time. I won't tell you too much because the students who went along are going to write their blog later this week, so check out their pages very soon!
Jensen of Tmandi (
Other than that it's been things as usual around here. Becky is still shoutng at the printer, and the printer is still beeping alarmingly at Becky every time she goes near it. Today is Wednesday, which is ICT Choices day. We've already seen Lyndsey, Harold and Steven. Lyndsey had a look at the ASDAN course stuff and decided that she would like to do that as well as ICT. Steven did a blog entry (check out the FAV Students blogs) and Harold... well he was in a very smiley mood today. Apart from downloading loads more music from his iTunes account, and hugging and kissing everyone, he also decided to pick up my iPhone and take pictures of us. David Bailey he is not, but I thought that I would share them with you just the same. Thanks Harold :)