Behind the headlines…..
…..the City Action blog story pt II
Last week I explored the benefits of RSS readers and explained how this was the start of the City Action blog creation process, so I will start from where I left off!
After exploring and adding to our CSR/Volunteering/Ethical blogs RSS reader page for a few weeks and crowing to anyone who would listen about how great it all was, I came to some conclusions about the information that is currently available:
Firstly, there is a good bank of knowledge about CSR, volunteering, the third sector and current ethical news out there, which is of great benefit to anyone who works within or is interested in these fields. However, despite being a wealth of information, it can sometimes be challenging to search through all the news items/articles that are relevant to your area of interest or expertise, particularly as many have an international focus.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly for this blog posting, I recognised that many of the blogs out there do not provide an opportunity for members of their sector, whether it be business or charity, to provide a contribution to a blog other than a brief comment.
Also, save for a few exemplary blogs including Addleshaw Goddards’s CSR blog, NESTA’s Innovation Exchange and YouthNet, I noticed the lack of real voices and honest commentary being featured.
This is where I hope City Action’s blog can help fill a gap - by encouraging you, the reader to provide a blog posting about your opinions and experiences from the world of volunteering and community involvement - we will be able to gain a greater understanding of the real stories and people behind the news headlines and the statistics.
I hope that next week’s posting will prove this point, as we hear straight from the horse’s mouth from a work placement student. Ayesha Malik, our talented City Business Trainee who has spent the Summer with City Action and our colleagues within the Economic Development team at the City of London, will be sharing her experiences with us. Watch this space!
Tags: collaborative blogging, CSR, ethical blogs, third sector, volunteering
August 29th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Thanks for the mention! Great post - I completely agree with your point about the international focus of quite a few of the CSR blogs out there. Looking forward to hearing some more voices from the sector on your blog!
Development Consultant
iT4Communities
August 29th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Good point about the voice of the blog often being from the corporate angle. I like your idea of opening it out to the readers to start off the discussion and post their own blog thoughts about CSR, volunteering and the voluntary sector. Cheers
CSR Manager
Addleshaw Goddard
September 4th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for noticing the “mental meanderings”. The Addleshaw Goddard blog is entirely uneditted - I get to write exactly what I want to and beleive this is the only way to ensure the integrity of the message. If corporates use copywriters to act as their voice then who’s line is it anyway?
I’m convinced corporate CSR blogs will only work if the corporate concerned is very very trusting of their CSR Manager, but don’t forget that I suspect that I only have to write one inflamatory column and I would be taken off air - so the blog becomes self policing.
Our blog is now one of the most popular parts of the AG CSR website and like all bloggers, it’s a great ego boost to think that people actually read it!!