First let me wish you a Happy New Year on behalf of the whole CharityKick team! Back in October, we published a blog post all around how to use social media to promote your charity fundraising event.  Giving you hints and tips on just what you need to do to ensure you’re able to see the most benefits possible from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, today we want to talk about another particularly popular resource you can use – a blog.

Whether you use one yourself extensively or just know the basics, we’ve all at least heard of what a blog is.  Although some will realise their potential more than others, the fact is if they’re used in the right way, a blog could be just as beneficial to your charity fundraising event as social media can be.

And whilst there’s a whole range of different reasons why this is the case, they all come back to the simple point that a blog can essentially be the one resource from which your fundraising event grows, develops, engages and promotes.

The basics of blogging

Think of what a blog actually is in its most basic form.  It’s a website that you can update easily.  Talking about anything you want to, the blog posts can be all text or packed full of media, such as images and videos.  The more you blog, the more popular the blog becomes and the more people who visit regularly and share the content.

Beginning to see how useful a blog could be already?

If you setup a blog for your charity fundraising event, even before you’ve launched it you can get people talking about what it is you’re going to do.  You talk about yourself as a person, why you’re doing the event and generally just stir up interest in it in such a way that when you do launch, you’re likely to already be engaging with several people who are going to be happy to pledge money to the cause.

Allowing you to develop the one thing that every charity strives to achieve, which is an audience that is genuinely interested in them to the extent that they want to keep returning time and time again, a blog allows for engagement and interaction on a level that isn’t able to be seen on many other platforms.

And all you have to do is talk about what is likely to be the main focus in your life at the moment – the fundraising event.

Understand what your audience wants

People like hearing what other people have to say.  They like seeing photos of things developing and enjoy watching videos that give some ‘behind the scenes’ footage of an event.  As a world we’ve become quite nosey and if we’re given the opportunity to find out something about someone that not many others are likely to know, we take the chance with both hands!

And if you’re not sure how true this is, just look at something like the computer game Grand Theft Auto V, which is due to be released in May 2013.  Ever since the last Grand Theft Auto was released in 2008, the internet has been going crazy with people looking for any snippet of information they can about the upcoming game – and as soon as something official is released, such as a trailer for the game or simply some updated information, it satisfies the audience immensely and helps the game to continually grow in popularity, ensuring its success upon launch.

Although you may not get the same level of interest as the next Grand Theft Auto game, this shows perfectly just how much we want to find out information about something before it’s even happened, with a blog providing the perfect platform for you to talk all about your event.

Talk, talk and talk some more

Unfortunately, many are put off blogging about their charity event because they’re not quite sure what they need to be doing.  Whilst there can be a lot of points you can learn over time, the most basic is that you simply have to provide you readers with fresh content on a regular basis.

From the moment you start thinking about your charity fundraising event through to weeks or months after it, a regular blog post will do a considerable amount to keep your audience interested (and if you can keep them interested afterwards, you’ve got a perfect audience all lined up for when you’re ready to start asking for donations for your next event!).

To benefit from blogging, it really doesn’t matter what type of event it is that you’re hosting.  From a local charity dare right through to an international show, on its most basic level a blog is simply something that allows you to publish a few words to an audience