Get involved in online discussions

Even if you don't have time to create a blog for your charity, its still worth getting involved in discussions in the blogging community - people often read the comments as well as the original article. In 2008, there were at least 133 million blogs worldwide, according to the 2008 State of the Blogosphere report by blog search engine Technorati.

Use Technorati to find the blogs that cover the issues you care about. To narrow down your search, you can filter the results to only list blog posts that have a lot of authority, or can search for blogs focused on a particular topic. For example, these are the blogs that discuss charity issues.

As well as providing comment on blogs, you can also comment on news stories posted online. Many news sites, including the websites of national newspapers, allow people to comment on articles. Most national papers only allow comments on opinion articles or blog postings, but The Times allows comments on all stories posted online.

You can also get involved in discussions on online forums. Some of the charity sector forums you might want to check out are AskCharity Messageboard, UK Fundraising Forum and the charity and fundraising section of UK Business Forums.

It is not usually worth creating your own forum, unless you are able to devote time to building the community. However, one charity that has built a successful forum on their website is the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust. They have a popular forum where employees and volunteers give advice to people on issues to do with ectopic pregnancies.