Salford Social Media surgery is a FREE event for those in the community and voluntary sector. You can speak to experts and get advice and tips on how social media can help your organisation.

Salford Social Media surgery is an initiative of Manchester Net Squared – a volunteer-led collective of people who aim to support those making social change with easy technology.

Sign up to attend and find out more

Visit the Social Media Surgery website to find out more and sign up to attend, and keep updated by following the #slcsms hashtag on Twitter.

A social media surgery is an informal event where “patients” get to spend one-to-one time with “surgeons”, looking at how social media can benefit their community organisation.

Need Help? Want to know how Twitter can help you campaign? How can Facebook help you connect? Or maybe you just need a basic starter? Please come along and join us…

Can Help? Can you spend an hour or two with a cup of tea and some local community projects, helping explain and show some of the ways social media could work for them? Please join the surgery…

Smiths Fan? You can also visit the Smiths’ Room, and have your picture taken to add to it!

Where and when

Date: Thursday 08 December 2011
Time: 4.30pm to 6.30pm
Venue: Salford Lads’ & Girls’ Club, St Ignatius Walk, Salford, M5 3RX (Google Map for the venue)

Find out more

Visit the Social Media Surgery website for more information and to book a slot.

A social media surgery is an informal event where “patients” get to spend one-to-one time with “surgeons”, looking at how social media can benefit their community organisation.

Need Help? Want to know how Twitter can help you campaign? How can Facebook help you connect? Or maybe you just need a basic starter? Please come along and join us…

Can Help? Can you spend an hour or two with a cup of tea and some local community projects, helping explain and show some of the ways social media could work for them? Please join the surgery… (Alan Holding from MDDA will be going along as one of the surgeons.)

Smiths Fan? You can also visit the Smiths’ Room, and have your picture taken to add to it!

Where and when

Date: Thursday 10 November 2011
Time: 4.30pm to 6.30pm
Venue: Salford Lads’ & Girls’ Club, St Ignatius Walk, Salford, M5 3RX (Google Map for the venue)

Find out more

Visit the Social Media Surgery website for more information and to book a slot.

Steven blogged about some of those techniques on the Manchester Net Tuesday blog, and he has also given us the heads-up on a new international pro bono programme for non-profits called The Analysis Exchange.

The Analysis Exchange has been set up to help community organisations obtain advice from local SEO experts. The programme is also an opportunity for budding SEO consultants to get experience, building their confidence and boosting local talent.

You can find out more on the Analysis Exchange website and there’s an introduction to the programme on YouTube.

You can also find Manchester Net Tuesdays on Twitter, and the group meets regularly at the MadLab.

If you’re a community or voluntary group in Manchester and want to learn more about using free and low cost online services to get things done, then why not come along to one of MDDA’s FREE morning web workshops, running once a month from October 2010 to March 2011.

You don’t need to be a technical whizz to benefit from these friendly, practical, hands-on sessions.

You’ll learn about ways to communicate to a wider audience, share information in a better ways and some new tools and techniques that you can start using straight away at no extra cost apart from your time.

What you’ll learn…

• How to use Dropbox – an “online USB memory stick” – to store your documents online, access them from anywhere and share them with other people
• How to use Google Forms to create contact forms for your website and simple online surveys
• What RSS feeds are and how to use them for research and faster news gathering
• Google search trips and tricks to help you find information quicker
• How to use the blogging service Posterous to blog via email
• How to edit photos online directly in your web browser without needing extra software
• Common keyboard shortcuts on Windows PCs and Macs
• How text expansion programs can save you typing time
• …and a few more as time permits!

Each workshop will be three hours long with a 30 minute break for refreshments half-way through. We’ll spend 15-20 minutes on each subject.

Feel free to bring along a laptop and use MDDA’s free high speed broadband connection during the workshop.

If you don’t want to bring a laptop, we’ll have some available for you to use, though you may need to share.

Workshop dates and times

• Tuesday 12 October 2010, 9.30am to 1pm
• Tuesday 9 November 2010, 9.30am to 1pm
• Tuesday 7 December 2010, 9.30am to 1pm
• Thursday 13 January 2011, 9.30am to 1pm
• Tuesday 1 February 2011, 9.30am to 1pm
• Tuesday 1 March 2011, 9.30am to 1pm

Venue

MDDA’s offices on Portland Street, city centre Manchester. You can find directions on MDDA’s website and a Google Map showing MDDA and travel stops is here.

Registration

If you want to register for one of these FREE workshops, please go to the event page on Eventbrite at http://mddawebworkshops.eventbrite.com.

Please note that places are limited to 15 people per session and a maximum of two people from one organisation per session.

More information

If you’d like more information about these workshops, please contact Alan Holding at MDDA by email or by phone on 0161 255 8111.

Register for this event online

Please register for this free event so we can make sure you get the most out of it.

About this event

If you are a voluntary or community sector organisation, freelancer or creative who would like to know more about “digital technology” and how it can help your work or your organisation it can sometimes be difficult to know where to go for advice and support.

Yet Manchester has a wide range of digital communities – from programmers, to social media specialists to digital content producers – who meet up regularly to share good practice.

Connecting 2.0 Communities is a pilot event to give anyone in the not-for-profit sector an opportunity to meet these digital communities – many of whom are happy to provide free advice and support, and would like to work more with community groups.

What you will find out

At this free to attend “drop in” event there will be an opportunity to :-

• get a one-to-one advice session about your own particular digital needs
• find out more about Manchester’s many “user groups” and informal meet-ups
• hear short introductions about key topics such as developing a Wordpress website, and using social media.

Where and when does it take place?

The event takes place on Wednesday 17th February from 2.00-6.30pm at the MadLab (Manchester Digital Laboratory), at 36-40 Edge Street, Manchester, M4 1HN, in the Northern Quarter (opp. Common Bar) Drop in any time after 2.00 – either stay for a short time, or stay all afternoon.

There will be food and drinks provided, and though you don’t need to book it will help us with numbers – and help identify who might be best for you to speak to – if you register at our online registration.

Who will be attending?

We’ll have more details soon but here’s a taster.

• Manchester Digital Development Agency, offering advice and support on all aspects of digital Manchester
• Madlab, find out about this new “community space” for digital working
• Speak to a Geek, get technical support from digital experts
• Social Media Cafe & Social Media Surgeries, find out more about these regular groups to help you use the social media more effectively
• Lets Go Global – &  other digital organisations, learn more about what organisations there are that can help you out.

Need to find out more?

For more information contact Adrian Slatcher:

• Email: a.slatcher@manchesterdda.com
• Phone: 0161 241 8207 or 0161 255 8111

Find out more about MadLab.

Who has organised it?

This event is funded by the Working Neighbourhoods Fund and run on behalf of Manchester City Council. It has been organised by Manchester Digital Development Agency in partnership with MadLab. Many thanks to all the digital organisations who have agreed to attend to make this event happen.

One Central Place enables VCS groups in Manchester to promote their work and make contact with other groups to network and share information. It also provides an opportunity for groups to be contacted and consulted on specific areas of interest.

It’s such a simple thing, yet it’s already helping local groups find out who else is working for social good in their neighbourhood.

The site encourages communication and networking in a range of ways. From facilities to browse the directory by location, or area of interest to interactive maps and dynamic visual cues so you can see similar organisations by the colouring of their icon on the site.

Once you’ve found the groups you’re interested in, it’s a snip to e-mail or call them, get directions to their office on a map or even export a PDF file, or a CSV spreadsheet for mail merging a letter to them all.

More than just a directory, the site also encourages partnership working by providing clear contact details for every organisation, along with a specifically developed calls for partnership section. Anyone interested in working with VCS groups in Manchester can create a call for partnership. Running a survey? Got a tender out? What to help build capacity in the sector? Need to partner up to secure funding or magnify your impact? It’s easy. Just describe what you’re looking for, select the areas of interest and locations the call matches and the site notifies all the groups it’s relevant to, and shows you a list of organisations that might be able to help.

Working with other organisations

One Central Place is also working with the Manchester Probation Service to put the site to work making our communities safer by reducing re-offending rates. Groups can register an interest in working with ex-offenders – an extremely hard to reach group. This puts them in touch with the Probation Service via the site, who ensures they have everything they need in place, advises them on best practice and helps them build capacity. Offender Managers – of which there are nearly 100 in Manchester alone – then match the ex-offenders they’re supporting with suitable groups and activities in their areas with the search facilities on the site. This is just one way the site is encouraging the third and public sectors to work in partnership to make Manchester a better place to be.

All of the data in the directory will be open to anyone who wants to use it via an API – just how people have created new experiences on the web by mashing up content from Flickr, Google or YouTube – now Manchester’s VCS groups can be added to the mix.

Find out more

Visit the One Central Place website to:

• Promote the work of your group to a wider audience.
• Find the details of other voluntary and community groups in specific localities and areas of interest.
• Make contact with similar groups to network/share good practice.
• Access the details of specific service providers and support agencies.
• Register your group’s details for FREE on the directory.

Contact the One Central Place Team by phone on 0161 234 2909 or by email at hello@onecentralplace.org.

About the work MDDA did with One Central Place

Through our Working Neighbourhoods Fund / Deprived Area Fund project work, MDDA worked with One Central Place to develop a specification for the site and help them find a web developer to do the work.

To develop the specification, we first ran a workshop with One Central Place staff to find out what they wanted to the site to do, what information should go on the site, and so on.

We did this by getting people to write down ideas on to Post-it notes – one ‘idea’ per note – and then clarify what had been written down. No technology was involved, all people had to do was bring along ideas and share them at the workshop.

We then worked to clarify the ideas from the workshop. Some ideas were fairly clear, such as wanting the site to have easy to read web page addresses. Others were not so clear, such as ’sophisticated search functions’ – it was our job to try and get more information about those ideas by asking questions a web developer might ask. What do you want people to search for? How should the search actually work? How do you want the search results to be shown on the page? Are there any other websites that have a search feature you want to emulate on the One Central Place website, and so on.

Doing this ‘clarification’ work also helped One Central Place staff to begin to get a sense of the work they would have to do to not just get the site up and running, but to support it and develop it in the long term. Who’s going to administer the site? What training will staff need? And so on.

We also worked with One Central Place to prioritise the ideas for the website. The project had a fixed budget, and not all the ideas proposed at the workshop could be turned into reality given the budget available. So we help One Central Place identify what features the site should have when it launched and what should be developed later.

After the workshop was over, we wrote up a report that started the process of ‘locking down’ the requirements for the website. This would also form the basis of the specification document that would be published for web developers to respond to.

We then worked with One Central Place staff to develop the specification document. A PDF of the specification document is still available to download if you want to read it. The specification took a couple of weeks to finalise as we wanted to give web developers as much information as we could to help them understand what was needed for the One Central Place website, and it also further helped One Central Place staff understand more about the ‘offline’ work that would need to be done.

The specification was then advertised on the MDDA website, the Manchester Digital website, the GeekUp Job Board and some other sites, and after shortlising and interviews, a supplier was appointed.

If you would like more information about this process, please contact MDDA.

From the developers

Read what Virtual Construction are saying about One Central Place.

The Web Angels project is one of Manchester Metropolitan University’s community engagement projects, supported by government funds awarded for the university’s outstanding work with local communities.

The project will provide a  web presence to up to 20 community groups in Crewe, Hulme and East Manchester that will allow them to communicate with their funders, volunteers and client groups. Groups will then be able to maintain their websites themselves.

This programme will be delivered by up to 20 student volunteers from MMU’s Department of Information and Communications.

More information

You can find out more about the Web Angels project on the MMU website, or by contacting Guy Lancaster by phone 0161 247 3446 or by email at g.lancaster@mmu.ac.uk.