Where to find charity networking events
Networking is a powerful tool for building your reputation, brand and social impact. Regularly attending charity networking events helps you to do all of these things. Here’s how to find charity networking events near you.
Eventbrite
The goto place to look for events of all kinds is Eventbrite. The website lists thousands of events every day, from business breakfasts and conferences to charity networking events and socials. Eventbrite will probably guess your location when you enter the site, so all you need to do is search “charity” or similar to find out what events are happening in your town.
Locality
Locality supports community organisations by providing advice, resources, peer learning and running events to help communities thrive. The organisation, a registered charity, has a vision to create a fairer society by assisting community organisations in their work. They run events nationwide and focus on important areas such as financial planning, innovation and supporting local businesses.
LinkedIn remains the dominant social media network for professionals, and as such people use it to promote events they are running or attending. The key here is to join relevant groups and to follow hashtags that interest you. When you do this, the content from those groups and hashtags begin to appear in your feed. If you follow, for example #charityevent, you will see content that is very specific to this. Take note however, there is no guarantee that this content will be relevant to you – in this case you might see no charity events near you.
A second and obvious-once-you-say it way to use LinkedIn to find charity networking events near you is to ask your contacts. Simply post an update to asking if anybody is aware of any events happening near you – you may be surprised at people’s willingness to help out!
UnLtd
UnLtd is a funding organisation that predominantly helps social entrepreneurs. The organisation works across the UK and provides support for early stage entrepreneurs who want to test an idea, as well as supporting established businesses who want to scale.
As part of their work UnLtd runs a number of events across the country. As a charity, you could benefit by attending these events to network, get free advice on financial planning, strategy and to meet social entrepreneurs who may be able to help with your mission.
Neighbourly
Neighbourly is a platform aiming to connect businesses, charities and social enterprises to the local community. The platform lets you find projects and events near you, as well as create profiles and raise money through the platform. Neighbourly is less about pure networking and more about connecting relevant people to achieve specific goals, such as providing IT support to older people in the community, or distributing food to the homeless. This is obviously more involved than a typical networking event but could be used by charities to forge deeper connections with those working in their community.