One of the main attractions of social nets is that they offer an exceptionally cost-effective way of communicating with a wider audience. Major investments are not normally needed to start a viral project.

2) Social nets are about communicating with the wider world, much more than with existing supporters. If everyone waits for someone else to provide ‘evidence’, little progress is made in any endeavour. Open your mind. In the UK, 24 million people have social net pages – 300 million in the big wide world. How else could you possibly talk to these people as directly and personally? If you pitch your charity’s case effectively, raising funds should naturally follow to experienced fundraisers.

3)How much more do you need to know to get under way? There’s plenty of free advice available. And why on earth are you not interested in ‘cool’? If ‘cool’ could generate funds for your charity, either you need to get ‘cool’ or be in another job.

4)In reality much social net activity is low cost (in time and money) and could often be done by keen staff members or volunteers. But this is naturally a point to consider.

5) I wonder how good you are at measuring success of email or direct mail, for example? Both are strongly disliked by the public, both on privacy and environmental grounds in the case of DM. It is very expensive and sure to decline.

Quite a lot of social net activity costs nothing but some staff time. You can not get a better ROI. The world of communications is changing fast. Yes, nobody can yet be sure of exactly when most audiences will communicate more through social nets than by email, but most pundits believe that is the way things are moving.

I submit that the fundraisers’ job is to grow the supporter base at the same time as raising the target income. This strategy reduces dependency on high-donation supporters and provides a more secure future income stream for the charity. Social nets, while not being a fundraising panacea, must play a key role in any membership organisation’s future communications and fundraising strategy.

If you’ve been in doubt, I urge you to take a fresh look at the value of social nets! You have little to lose and a huge amount to gain.

As I’ve said before, I think that social nets (like mobile – which I’ve not seen you talk about – perhaps I missed it) will do SOMETHING for us – but it isn’t going to replace mail, email or major donor work anytime soon. And, it is questionable what effect it will even have on growing our file sizes or supporting other marketing efforts.

The questions you challenge us with today are right on.