Nick Wilson Young
Nick says...
Here at NCVO I use strategic insight and planning tools to help civil society make better plans. Before NCVO I was a grassroots peacebuilder in the Balkan wars, then in the East End, and also worked on human rights education in ex-Warsaw Pact countries and on peace campaigning in the UK. I speak Serbo-Croatian (but less each year) and have a fascination with history. I'm a huge fan of strategic analysis because during nearly 20 years in campaigning, human rights and conflict transformation I’ve seen too many heroic frontline organisations wiped out by events that could have been foreseen. Read my blog here: http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/NickWilsonYoung
In Third Sector Foresight our eyes are always peeled, scanning the horizon for events that may impact the sector for good or ill (or, as is often the case, events that will benefit some parts of the sector, or those that are prepared for them, and disadvantage other parts of the sector, or those that aren’t prepared).
<>On 13 November NCVO hosts its Autumn conference in Manchester: ‘Looking to the election and beyond’, where I’ll be co-facilitating the booked-out workshop ‘Looking out and...This Autumn the latest in NCVO’s Third Sector Foresight free mini-guides, Future Focus 7, will study the future of campaigning. Here Nick Wilson, new Third Sector Foresight Officer and winner of a Sheila McKechnie Foundation Award for campaigning, looks at what the recent Camp for Climate Action tells us about that future.
<>Over the Bank Holiday weekend Climate Camp staged six days of protest in Blackheath, London, under the banner “The future is not what it used to be”. This was just the...
The Totnes experiment also raises other questions for civil society.
If the South Hams area is a safe Conservative constituency, could the selection of GP Sarah Wollaston as Tory candidate in this US-style 'primary' be said to have effectively replaced the likely 2010 general election? Yet Dr Wollaston was interviewed on Newsnight saying that she was given just £200 to spend on her ‘primary’ campaign, and had no time to canvas support, and little apparent inclination for it.
<>Will we see more...Pritesh makes a good point. The ideal balance between online and offline interaction with your users/supporters/members of course depends on who they are, what you want to do with them, and what you want them to do for you.
Campaigning is one area where there is hot debate about how to translate online clicks into people at a demonstration, or vice versa, and whether this is even important. Click here to see the discussion elsewhere on this site.
<>Fundraising is another field where the...