A little extra help

When people volunteer to help a charity, they might imagine themselves standing behind a sales table, doing something mad for sponsorship or stuffing newsletters into envelopes.

A lot of volunteering for BRACE is done, not in the BRACE office or at the charity’s own events, but within groups to which the volunteer already belongs. This could mean a business, school, college or church, for example, which has made BRACE its supported charity.

In the past week, we have gained greatly from little bits of extra help from two people who belong to groups which have supported BRACE in the last year, and I would like to thank them.

First, there was Ali, who works for IOP Publishing, big supporters of BRACE in 2012. She offered to carry on volunteering for us, and spent a day in the office this month. Out of this came a conversation about the fact that it was so difficult for people to sign up to follow my blog. Well, I like to think that’s the only reason I don’t have more followers.

Ali found that I was missing a simple trick, in that BlogSpot provides a gadget or widget or something which creates a much simpler sign up option. Anyway, with Ali’s help, I installed it and then changed the layout of the blog so readers could actually see the sign-up box without having to prod the margins of the screen with the cursor.

Then there was another problem which has dogged us for even longer. We set up our Facebook page in 2009 and it has never been visible to searches within Facebook or Google searches on, say, brace + facebook. You had to know the URL to find it or navigate there from our website.

This has baffled us. Over time we have asked an SEO expert and various social media clever clogs to help us, all to no avail. Until yesterday, that is, when the new president of the Medical Science Society at UWE, a student society supporting BRACE for the third year running, came in to introduce herself. I don’t know how it came up in conversation, but Sofi said she thought she might know what to do. A few minutes later – bingo!

Thank you Sofi, thank you Ali. These look like small contributions to our work, but they could be very big. Who knows how much of a difference they could make to our visibility and, as a result, the resources we could bring in future to dementia research?

Just a small reminder that you don’t need a fat bank account, hours and hours of spare time or a doctorate in biochemistry to make a worthwhile contribution to fighting dementia.