Thanks for checking out my new-ish blog home; very much a work in progress but a place I can call my own.

I’ll be posting here now, and on Twitter, rather than at nfp 2.0.

I feel privileged to work with great people at Make Your Mark, Flickr, NCVO, Action for Children, The Lounge Group, cScape, Policy Unplugged, Amnesty UK, Sift, Samsung Mobile, the Charity Technology Trust, and a wide and talented network of friends. I also help manage a thriving online community for the CIPD. In short, I get up to all sorts of stuff I feel passionate about.

I coined the concept of a buzz director for people inside organisations who champion the use of social media to effect positive change. I encourage charities work to release authentic voices in their organisations, particularly through storytelling and fundraising networks. I’m invited to talk about all this at conferences and to small groups, such as charity marketing managers and digital engagement teams (e.g. The National Trust, Action Aid).

I really don’t like silo thinking, and I’ve earned a bit of a reputation for not shying away from asking challenging questions of charities around issues of transparency, accountability and sustainability in the 21st century.

Over the past 13 years, I’ve helped organisations like the British Heart Foundation, the Labour Party, and the Church of England (and too many more to mention here) all create a presence and do good stuff online.

I’ve won a few awards for my blogging, too. In 2006, I was the first non-Mexican recipient of the Colibri Ecotourism Achievement Award, which is presented to “a leading catalyst working towards ecotourism in Mexico”.

In 2003, I received the awfully prestigious Lente de Plata (’Silver Lens’) award from the President of Mexico for my writing.

I created two respected Mexico-related blogs:

• After Wilma, a blog that challenged the broadcast model of communicating a destination to tourists in a crisis (makes for a great case study!)

• Mexicanwave, (Ten Best Travel Blogs, The Guardian), which is still the independent online resource most often cited in guidebooks to Mexico (although there’s nothing much going on there now, these things are persistent).

What else? Well, I think I’m a half-decent amateur photographer. It gets me outdoors where I have a developed a particular fondness for peering up at the sky from beneath a tree (not sure what this says about me). I own only a Sony Cypershot compact digital camera, but I’m pleased with the results. My Mexico x 100 series of photographs has received some acclaim outside of my immediate family and been viewed more than 14,000 times. 

I won’t bore you with the details, but here’s a list of some of the things I am now…

• Parent and School Governor (and proud of it!)
• Blogger, Buzz Director, Community Builder & Flickr for Good Evangelist
• Member, NCVO ICT Foresight e-panel

or have been…

• Community Manager at Sift
• Business Development Manager, travel portal (which dot-bombed)
• Charities Development Manager, Justgiving
• Director, Web Consultancy… with Nigel Dunn
• Campaigner, Oxfam UK
• Operations Manager, Blue Peter Appeal (honestly)
• Academic Advisor, Macmillan Education
• Primary school teacher, Mexico (I swear, never again…)
• Observer, Federal Elections, Mexico
• Welfare Officer, Student Union Executive (when I had more hair on my chin than I now have on my head)

I moved out of London in 2002, back to the West Country where I grew up (as you do). I now live in a particularly green part of North Somerset with my young half-English, half-Mexican family. Not too far from Bristol though.

You can get hold of me by email: mexicanwave [at] gmail [dot] com

or Skype:

 
Skype: buzzdirector