Louise Brown's blog

It's a sad day in NCVO towers. It's the last day at work for lots of us as we're affected - along with 100s of our members - by the cuts in public sector spending. I've been at NCVO for over five years and in that time I've been working with organisations to help them to use technology to be more effective and efficient.

What's the usual structure of your trustee meetings?

You get sent the papers a few days before, everyone has been too busy to look at them, you waste time reading documents and going over old ground, there's disagreement about who was meant to be doing what and in the end no major decisions are made?

If that sounds like your board then there is help out there and technology might be the solution.

I met with a friend recently to help her think about how she could write a blog for her small business. A lot of the concepts are easily transferable to voluntary organisations so I thought it might be useful to post them up here.

If you're a trustee, how do you approach your organisation's technology? Do you see it as a vital element for success or do you think it's something best left to the techies?

The reality is that effective technology is led from the top, is there to achieve an overall mission, driven by strategy and championed by everyone.

As part of my trip to Estonia last week I was lucky enough to meet Arvo Ott, Director of the e-Governance Academy.

"The e-Governance Academy (eGA) is a non-governmental, non-profit organisation, founded for the creation and transfer of knowledge concerning e-governance, e-democracy and the development of civil society"

It's been a great opportunity whilst being out here in Estonia to learn more about local projects that are making the most of the internet. One of these projects was launched by the Uue Maailma Selts community group, an area of Tallinn.

I'm in Estonia at the moment for a meeting about an ENNA project and this morning we were lucky enough to have the meeting hosted by Skype.

I don't know how many of you realise that Skype is an Estonian company? I know I certainly didn't know before we came out here.

Last week Stony Grunow from Third Sector IT very kindly gave me a bit of his time to talk about cloud computing and how it could benefit voluntary and community organisations.

From 1st March 2011 the Advertising Standards Authority's (ASA) Committee of Advertising Practice Code will be extended to cover statements that organisations (including charities) make on websites they control, including their own and other pages such as Facebook pages.

Any page of content (such as text, video or images) that contains an ask for donations needs to comply with the code of practice.

I went to a fab talk this morning by Beth Kanter, organised by The Guardian's new Voluntary Sector Network.