Category: Thought leadership

Despite the promising news of vaccines rolling out to combat COVID-19, mistrust and discord challenge their adoption. Concerns have been raised about the take-up of the Covid vaccine among Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

My name is Vikram and I’m a Canadian ex-pat living in the UK. I was hired by Lightful in late June 2019 as a Senior User Experience (UX) Designer. My reasons for wanting to join such a company are manyfold, but primarily stem from wanting to do something that makes a difference. When I say this, I really do mean ‘difference’ in terms of making life better for all, not for fulfilling a generic company vision!

When we asked charities to tell us last year what the key issues were that they faced in digital, the main challenge wasn’t tools, data or platforms. It was about people, and specifically, leaders. In the 2018 Charity Digital Skills Report, which we run annually with Skills Platform, charity professionals told us that they expected greater digital leadership.

Last year we predicted that more charities would be experimenting with chatbots, videos would be ‘thumb-stopping’, brands would become more purposeful, charities would become more transparent and content would become more visual. All of these digital trends have definitely happened – although perhaps not as much as we thought (AI, chatbots and Alexa skills are still not commonplace). So what does 2019 hold?

This is a guest post by Nikki Bell, winner of the Social CEOs Rising Star Award.

There are so many things you can do on digital, even if you are a small organisation with a limited budget. This morning I was working with a small, volunteer-led charity (the PTA at my kids’ school), and they were wondering what to do about the range of social networks that are out there, how to make more of their website, how to do more with data, how to use digital to fundraise and how to structure their content around what parents want. If a small, brilliant charity like theirs doing great work to raise much-needed funds isn’t sure where to start, then there must be thousands of others in the same situation.

There are some books that just leave such a lasting impression on you, either personally or professionally. A good book will change the way you think, feel or act. Here, we share just a few of the books that made us.

Did you know that TED started as a one-off conference in 1984 where technology, entertainment and design converged? Hence the name today. They’re also a nonprofit whose mission it is to ‘spread ideas’.

I’ve just landed back in London after an inspiring week in New York, where I met lots of amazing charities and foundations and attended the Social Good Summit. The annual summit brings together global citizens and progressive thought leaders for a full day of jam-packed sessions with over 50 speakers from around the world.

This is the last of our ‘Ten people you should know about’ series and this time it’s the turn of the leaders. We want to highlight ten leaders, in the social good space, who we think should be on your radar – if they’re not already! We’d also love to hear who you think is a great leader so we can follow them – let us know by tweeting us @Lightful.

When Carlos, Johnny and I founded Lightful, it was to give charities and social enterprises access to the best technology, at an affordable price, so that they can create bigger impact for those they help. We were frustrated that the sector, as a whole, wasn’t making the most of the opportunities that technology offers so we looked for a solution that would help them save time, raise more awareness of their cause and make it easier to raise funds too.

The age of automation has arrived. It is an array of technology that includes: robots, chatbots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, conversational interfaces, smart devices, drones, self-driving cars and others which are increasingly becoming the interface between organisations and humans. These technologies have been in development for decades but are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives and will continue to have a significant impact on our work and lives.

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook is changing the algorithm for its news feed to ‘bring people closer together’. Naturally, charities and social enterprises saw this as a negative announcement but we don’t think it is (and we’ll tell you why).

The decorations have come down, the last of the turkey has been consumed and it’s time to unwrap those 2018 diaries. Here at Lightful, we’ve been thinking about what the new year holds for charities and social enterprises, and what trends we’ll see coming to the fore in 2018.