I’ve been doing a fair amount of blog training recently, whether for students, academics, NGOs or other aid agencies. It’s fun but quite time consuming, and I recently realized (not for the first time), that I’m actually pretty redundant. If I post the slides (below) and some suggestions for structure, pretty much anyone can run a training session. Job done.

We recently spent some time reviewing the first 3 months of #PowerShifts, the new iteration of FP2P, aimed at transforming its messengers, messages and formats over the next two years. The project is in the hands of Maria Faciolince, a Colombian-Antillean anthropologist and activist, supported by Oxfam’s Amy Moran (if you’ve noticed an improvement in the way this blog looks

In the 11 years since I launched this blog, it’s churned out getting on for 2 million words across 2,500+ posts, generating 12,600 comments (thanks everyone). It’s time to change things up. Up to now, I’ve been running the blog as pretty much a solo effort – roughly a day and a half a week to generate 5 posts, deal with

Hi everyone, Happy New Year and all that. Thought I’d kick off with the usual feedback post on last year’s blog stats: According to Google Analytics, overall reader stats for 2018 were: 328,887 ‘unique visitors’ – not quite the same as ‘different readers’ – if you read the blog on your PC, laptop and mobile, that counts as 3 people.

Should I be worried/offended when someone pays me to write less? Nah, actually I’m very excited. As regular readers may have noticed, In recent years I’ve been inviting more guests onto the blog, but have always struggled to find the time and resources to do it properly. Now the Ford and Hewlett Foundations have kindly stumped up some funding to

I’ve run several blogging workshops in recent weeks, with seasoned campaigners at Global Witness, Oxfam Novib’s youth wing, and academic bloggers at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague. All three sessions followed a similar format, developed for a Unicef session I ran last year – a half hour intro from me, and then an editing session where we

Anthropologists do things differently, including blogging. My attention was piqued by Tim Allen’s reply to a commenter on his recent post (with Melissa Parker) on Ebola in Sierra Leone, in which he casually mentioned ‘It is perhaps worth adding that the chief and elders wanted us to write it, and we read it out at a meeting of the whole

Late last year, 350 or so of you were kind enough to fill in an FP2P reader survey, so it’s time to feed back the results (big thanks to Amy Moran for doing the leg work). As well as being a useful snapshot, it’s also interesting to compare it to the previous reader survey from 2012 (I know how many

Had a fun day earlier this week running a blogging workshop for Unicef researchers in their wonderful centre in Florence (I know, tough gig etc). I ran through what is rapidly becoming my standard powerpoint (here you go, feel free to steal or comment), but the most interesting (and exhausting) session was working through nine draft blogs with their authors

There’s no way I can come out of this looking good, but I need your help. I’ve been asked to contribute a chapter to a new edition of a Routledge book, Popular Representations of Development: Insights from Novels, Films, Television and Social Media. The topic is…. this blog. So I have put together what can best be described as 5000

Hi everyone, Happy New Year and all that. Thought I’d kick off with the usual feedback post on last year’s blog stats: The blog passed a couple of milestones last year – since it started in 2008, it’s clocked up 2000 posts, 1.4 million words, and 10,000 comments (big thanks to everyone who takes the time to add theirs). Only

I’m running a ‘blogging for beginners’ session at LSE today, so thought I’d post this to coincide. Whenever I try and get evangelical about blogging, the anguished cry goes up ‘where do I find the time?!’ I admit I’m spoilt – blogging takes up 30-40% of my 4 days a week at Oxfam. But at five posts a week, that