After Thoughts by Jane Taylor

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The right result
I hope very much this will be a postscript on the distressing affair of the National Coalition of Anti Deportation Campaigns vs the media. In any event I want to register my admiration for the Community Fund for keeping its nerve under intense pressure. At the end of a very nasty row it came out fighting, with a strong affirmation of the rights of minority and unpopular causes, which is exactly what it is there for. I also want to welcome the repeated and strong commitments given by the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell to a ‘politician-proof’ distribution system. Long may it remain so.

The wrong message
One of the lessons to come out of NCADC was that the CF needs to keep closer tabs on website material. It’s not the only one. This is the time of year when colleagues and I spend hours wading through a couple of dozen websites to pin down information about lottery programme changes as part of the process of updating our wallchart. The exercise leaves me exasperated. Although several distributors now have good websites, some are pretty negligent about maintaining their online information, retaining out-of-date details, failing to add new information and often – a common but serious editorial crime on the web – failing to date specific pieces of information at all. For me, however, there’s a worse kind of shoddiness going unchallenged among key lottery award partners, which I can only describe as an unbecoming shyness about the source of their funding. I have found two glaring examples. Barnardo’s is a NOF green spaces partner, making awards for children’s play. NOF rates them, because it has just given them a top-up of £1.5m for their scheme. But on the Barnardo’s website, the introductory page to Better Play carries this opening paragraph: ‘Barnardo’s and the Children’s Play Council are working in partnership to deliver Better Play – a four-year £9.28m grant programme. Barnardo’s and the Children’s Play Council are one of 11 award partners chosen by the New Opportunities Fund to deliver the £125m ‘Green Spaces and Sustainable Communities’ Environment Initiative.’ The missing word? Lottery. It appears nowhere on that introductory page. There is no ‘lottery funded’ logo – nothing to enlighten us where Barnardo’s, or NOF, got the money from. My second example is UnLTD, the newly established consortium in charge of a £100m endowment fund from the Millennium Commission to spend on encouraging social enterprise. UnLTD’s website opens with a page of promotional information about itself and its seven constituent organisations. But if my memory is correct, the consortium only came together in the first place to bid for the Millennium funding, and nowhere on that introductory page is there mention of that fact, or the Millennium Commission, or the lottery. In this instance the buck stops with the chair of the Millennium Commission, I believe. Over to you, Secretary of State.

The unreadable read
My final moan on the subject of websites (for now) is prompted by Nesta’s relaunch of its site (www.nesta.org.uk), with some good information, background reads and interactive fun to showcase its mission. But Nesta’s clever web designers have committed the elementary sin of using ‘fixed fonts’, which means that you and I cannot use our browser buttons to increase the size of the text on the page, whether for comfort or necessity (as in my case). Isn’t there a basic accessibility design standard these days for ‘public’ websites?