I’ll make no secret of the fact that (in my head at least) this site has been going for just 14 days. Yes, Give A Brick was registered as a charity in November 2007. Yes, thanks to offline marketing and support of family and friends, Give A Brick has raised enough money to complete phase 1 of our first project. However, the idea behind the website was that we could use it as a way to show case the charity and our unusual approach to fund raising. We’re using the power of the web to ask everyone to give a brick (i.e. £1) and asking them to ask their friends to do the same. To that end, the site has only been working for 14 days. Up until 14 days ago, we had a site and a handful of supporters but we had no idea how to tell everyone that we existed.

Late in December 2009 I met a lovely lady on Twitter called Samantha. Her rather excellent Twitter e-book pointed me in the right direction of how we could use social media for social good. However, I still didn’t know how we would persuade people to visit this site. Thanks to the power of hind-sight, it all seems rather simple now. Why didn’t I think of it before?! We add lots of interesting, fresh content to the website, make you smile, help you out a bit with hints and tips that we’re learning along the way and generally be a good place to visit. Sounds simple? You’d think so but like I said, it’s taken over two years to get us to this point!

We’re a Christian charity. I for one believe that Give A Brick was an idea that God gave me back in August 2007. To that end, I believe it is no small coincidence that a gentleman started a website back in October that has been a rocketing success. Good for him. What good’s that for Give A Brick? Well thankfully, this gentleman (I want to call him a young man but that makes me sound ancient and he’s only a couple of years younger than me ) is more than happy to tell anyone who’ll listen, all about what he’s been doing and how you can do it to. How much does he charge a good cause like us for information like that? Same as he charges the rest of the Internet world … zero.

So I’ve been working very hard for the last 14 days, asking questions, listening, reading and generally being the good student that my mother always told me I was. Is 14 days too soon to see a difference? The easy answer is of course not. Fourteen days ago we had no comments on the site from people I wasn’t related to. Now we have lots. Fourteen days ago, with the exception of one lovely lady, the only people who had given a brick online were people who I’d built websites for or again, people I’m related to Now, we have started to see people Give A Brick online just because they want to support the charity and not because we share the same blood or they owe me a favour

But as much as I’m pretty poor at maths, I do like things that are measurable. I haven’t yet learned about daily unique visitor numbers but I have heard of a little website called Alexa. Thirteen days ago, I visited Alexa.com to find out what our traffic ranking was. I’m told that to be in the top 100,000 is excellent so for a small operation like us I wasn’t holding my breath Thirteen days ago, our traffic ranking was over 8 million. To put a happy spin on it, we were in the top 8 million. I took small encouragement from the fact that a couple of other websites I’d put together for people weren’t ranking at all but 8 million. Ouch!

Within a couple of days we’d sliced a couple of million off and today we’re down to just under 3 million but our 7 day figure is even more exciting: 493,484

You’re right, I have no idea what the 7 day figure means versus the 3 month figure and I read that one shouldn’t hold much store by Alexa. However, right now it is the only measurable thing I have access to. And right now I am very excited that in just 14 days, we have gone from over 8 million to (I think) just under 500,000. That’s 7.5million in 14 days. Cool

If you enjoyed this post, please Give A Brick. It’ll only cost a quid

photo credit: Shauna Alexander

Over to you. What do you think?

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It’s just another one of the ways you can Give A Brick and then tell your friends

Tagged as: 14, day