This is an opportunity to work in a small and dynamic start-up environment and to really make a difference in the launch of a new website that will support grassroots charitable organisations across the UK.

Localgiving.com is a new online solution that is setting out to change the face of local philanthropy, initially in the UK and eventually worldwide. The company is based in Holborn, London.

It will strengthen local communities by using internet technology to empower local charities to be effective and sustainable. Localgiving.com has been described by The Policy Exchange, a UK Think Tank, as “a unique and significant step forward in the use of the web for philanthropy.” The plan is to ultimately build the largest online community of local charities and volunteer organisations and connect them with a whole new set of donors.

Every charity that appears on Localgiving.com has been vetted by their local Community Foundation in a process that has been approved by the UK’s Charity Commission. Both shareholders of Localgiving.com are registered charities, but it is run as a business and for the good of the community it serves.

The site is already live in eight test Community Foundations across the UK, 15 more are due to go live in the next three months, and it plans to be nationwide before the end of 2010. Currently the Localgiving.com team consists of nine people.

Job Role

The Executive Assistant to the CEO has three key roles:

· Analysis of a wide range of data including web analytics, donations, sign up rates and renewal rates, and condensing them into a clear dashboard of management information and ad hoc reports for the Localgiving management team and Board, as well as Community Foundations, local charities and other third parties including government bodies.

· Managing the accounting system through Sage software

· General administrative support to the CEO

Skills and Experience

· Be comfortable working with a large level of complex data and present it simply, clearly and graphically.

· Have an excellent attention to detail to ensure timely and accurate reports

· Have excellent verbal and written communication skills

Qualifications

· A good degree in business studies, marketing analytics or economics from a good UK university

· Market leading knowledge of analytical & data mining tools

· Database management & manipulation skills

· Experience with accounting systems, preferably Sage.

Compensation: up to £20,000

Contact:  marcelle.speller@localgiving.com

Thanks to funding from the Higher Education Entrepreneurship Group, Alan, Lorraine Warren and myself will be developing this introductory session into a series of more specialist workshops to be delivered both offline and online through 2010. Watch this space…

Just requires a nice short walk to work past the cathedral, shame about the rain

I hope everyone enjoys the unit – please feel free to leave your feedback in your comments to these weekly posts.

1. Toolkit Websites employ over 20 people, with about 12 in their office in Carlton Crescent, Southampton. It is a fast growing and dynamic web design agency with an innovative business model, providing websites for SMEs around the country.  The company is looking to improve its online marketing, and is looking for an intelligent marketing student, (preferably on a masters course) to come and give some insight and advice on digital marketing, lead generation, SEO and other innovative communication. This short, focused project might be of real interest to someone doing a marketing course at the university for a paper or a dissertation.

Details of the roles available and how to apply can be found here:

http://southampton.gumtree.com/southampton/72/52094672.html

http://southampton.gumtree.com/southampton/72/53089072.html

http://southampton.gumtree.com/southampton/89/52094389.html

2. Lloyd Davis is looking for a part-time intern (3 days per week for 3 months) working as an assistant and apprentice social artist, to start as soon as possible. Lloyd’s portfolio of social art projects includes:

The Tuttle Club
tuttle2texas
Centre for Creative Collaboration
Tuttle Consulting

He needs help with research, administrative and project management tasks. This is an opportunity for the job holder to expand their thinking about the social applications of the web, social enterprise and the use of social technologies in organisations.

The successful applicant will need to be comfortable writing for the web, expressing themselves in their own voice on blogs and social networking sites, but also speaking to people face to face and on the phone. They will gain exposure to Lloyd’s network of social media professionals, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, artists, and academics. Experience of organising without an organisation and exploring the boundaries of how organisations need to function in a networked world will also be obtained.

Lloyd says: “ This is an unpaid position, although a zone 1-2 oystercard will be provided and I’ll buy you lunch. There’ll also be the occasional beer if you like that sort of thing…”

Email Lloyd on lloyd.davis@gmail.com and tell him why you’d like to work with him, and what in particular you think you can offer to the projects listed above.

Venue: Room 1019, Building 58a (School of Management Executive Education Centre), University of Southampton, Highfield Campus.

Internet use is so pervasive across society now that using it is considered normal behaviour.  But consumers are surprisingly unaware of how much information about them is collected – either online or offline and how this gets combined.

Currently the main application of this knowledge is to entice you to buy products and services that you otherwise might not have bought.  You use Google but do you realise how much they know about you?  German authorities are so concerned they have just told Google to stop tracking website visitors without their consent.

In the UK we seem less anxious.  But privacy and the data about you that companies capture and sell on to others will become a hot topic.  Not least because of the business opportunity this represents for the legal profession.

Date: Thursday 28th January 2010. 6pm Registration, 6.30pm Presentation, 8pm finish.

To book your FREE place please email busdev@soton.ac.uk with your contact details and numbers of seats you wish to reserve.

I suspect that some of the audience will be sceptical, so I thought I’d use this blogpost to supplement our discussions and present some support for our case

In an interesting presentation last year, Martin Weller of the Open University claimed that the time will come when our online identity is indistinguishable from our academic identity – that is simply how academics will be defined. The various tools that we now use to build and manage our digital presence can be mixed and matched to suit the particular needs of the individual, so online identity is distributed across a range of platforms which can then be shared and integrated in a variety of ways – in my case I mainly use Twitter, Slideshare and Delicious, all co-ordinated through this blog. Everyone’s online identity is therefore unique and their work can be widely distributed to a range of different audiences, and then informed and enhanced by feedback from these networks.

Martin goes on to discuss the growing IMPACT of online activity, where the reach of every individual blogpost can be calculated in terms of the number of its readers and the quality of feedback received in the form of comments and links to related work. Similarly, a Slideshare profile will showcase not just the content of the presentations that individual has posted, but also how many readers each presentation has had, and how many people have commented on that work or marked it as a favourite. It is not difficult to accumulate impact in this way that far exceeds the readership of my published academic articles, which I usually have to apologise for as out of date before they even see the light of day…

I plan to this post with feedback from the session on Wednesday (assuming I escape in one piece…)

"Sadly, I expect we shall see an increasingly depressed and debilitated generation who, as a result, become decreasingly likely to find work and hang on to it …young people bore the brunt of the recession last year, with one in five 16-to-24-year-olds out of work today. The result is a generation of undiscovered skills and talents.”

Contrast all this doom and gloom with an upbeat article in last week’s Wall Street Journal:

“Landing a job of the future takes a two-track mind. Career experts say positions in growing fields will require an in-demand degree coupled with skills in emerging trends.”

Job seekers will need to branch out and pick up secondary skills or combine hard science study with softer skills, career experts say.  For example, techies will need to keep up with the latest in web marketing, user-experience design and other web-related skills. More than two million new technology-related jobs are expected to be created in the US by 2018, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Jobs that are expected to grow faster than average include computer-network administrators, data-communications analysts and Web developers. Recruiters anticipate that data-loss prevention, information technology, online security and risk management will also show strong growth.

The article goes on to note the role of social media in career planning. As companies turn to sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to promote their brands, capture new customers and post job vacancies, they will need to hire people skilled in harnessing these tools. Large companies such as Coca-Cola are creating entire teams devoted exclusively to social media. As a great example of how to use social media effectively (and at the same time, showcase the very skills that employers are seeking!) check out this video by Jay Foreman and read the viewers’ comments (sourced courtesy of Martin Tod, prospective MP for Winchester). The content is fascinating, Jay’s presentation and production even more so:

The message? Don’t wait around for old job structures to return, because they won’t. Make your own luck. Think ahead, update your digital skills and start impressing possible employers by developing your online presence, ideally focused within a business community where demand for employees is likely to increase.  

The key theme of this session is the growing importance of entrepreneurial skills in developing the profile of an individual or a small business in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’. Increasingly, these skills can be showcased online through blogging and social networking.

One of our objectives for 2010 is to integrate the development of online communication and networking skills more effectively into our programmes, through the vehicle of personal development portfolios (PDP) which we are trialling this year. We will be reporting on our progress at the Association for Learning Technology’s Conference (ALT-C) in September.