Just wanted to publish this article as a Mr Preson Moore just emailed my to give me the answer to a problem I had been searching for some months back.  We had many many spam registers on one of our pages and I had nearly 3000 users to manually delete from the database.

We are offering a totally free design and hosting service to all UK Registered Charities

Whether you are revamping an old site or are a totally new Charity our service is totally free of charge.

What… Completely Free Website Design for Charities??!

Yes absolutly free! You just need to either register your .org website address or point your current URL to our servers.

Vector art is one of the most popular art forms used by computers. Vector art differs from bitmap art in the physical rendering of images. Bitmap art renders images in pixels or several dots of color. Vector art renders images in lines.

Vector art is often preferred because an image is rendered the way the brain actually views it and does not distort when magnified. Instead of .JPEG, .GIF, .BMP, .JPG and .PCX used for extensions for bitmap art, vector art is denoted by extension .EPS and .SVG. Typically, .EPS files are used for printing, and .SVG files are used for rendering images on the Web.

Having worked for a charity before, I’ve written my fair share of funding bids.

And along with that I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and learnt from these.

Funders are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by charities and third sector organisations wanting funding.

So being able to submit a successful application is difficult and you will meet some tough competition.

Which is why you need to be able to write something that really makes the funder want to provide you with the funding and makes them believe in you as a charity.

Below are some top tips for writing an effective funding bid.

I’ve read various posts across the internet with reasons as to why you should or should not outline fonts when sending artwork to printers or clients for approval.  The basic answer from myself is that yes you should outline your fonts.

Why Do We Need Fonts Outlining?

When we open artwork on our systems here we need to have the same fonts in our font library that you have used in your document in order to open the file.  If we don’t have the font then Illustrator will give us a popup warning telling us which fonts are missing, and it will reset the font to the default system font.

Generally we will then do a brief search on the internet to see if this is a non commercial and freely available font.

If it is then we will download it and reopen your file.   Happy Days problem solved!

Every new business needs business stationery.  Letter heads, compliment slips and business cards should form the basis of your paper based marketing and as such need to be right from the start.

People will see your business stationery regularly so it needs to be able to promote a clear brand and provide a professional image.

As a charity it’s important to take advantage of all the help and support you can get and it’s sometimes difficult to find.

Having spent many hours searching for ways of reducing costs in some of the most expensive areas of running small charities I have found a few great places to get started.

Here are my 5 favourite places for providing you with some free or very low cost items:

I’ve been looking lately for a more secure and reliable place to store all our artwork files and customer documents.  We have for so long had a shared network drive with an ever increasing list of client folders in.

I wanted to have this backed up so that we could never lose the data.

You can easily setup a google drive account for free if you have a google account.  If you have gmail or use any of google’s other services then you already have an account you can use for google drive.

You initially get a free 5GB drive space which to be fair will serve the average user more than adequately.  We have upgraded to a 200GB drive space to backup all of our client artwork.

I’ve put together a step by step guide to setting up google drive and sharing a file or folder with us…

One of the most effective ways to raise funds as a charity is to sell items – whether its second hand donated items or promotional merchandise, but the thought of a shop leaves many charities thinking its just not worth it – all the costs associated with a shop such as overheads, staffing and keeping a regular stock will mean for some charities its just not worth the hassle.

Ebay cuts this problem out and lets you sell as much or as little as you want online.

Below we have started to build a great collection of Fundraising Ideas.

We are building on this all the time and welcome any additional ideas to be posted in the comments below.

You are welcome to use any of the cartoons/pictures in this post for your own blogs as we had them especially commissioned.  You Can get Hi Res versions here if you like them

 1 – Run a Marathon

Getting sponsored to run a marathon is one of the top ways to raise money for the charity or cause you support.

You can use a service like “Just Giving” to make it easy for friends, family or work colleagues to sponsor you.

Why not dress up as something weird to get into the Guinness book of records? Or… maybe carry a fridge all 26 miles?