Social networking sites have extraordinary potential to be used as arenas for public discussion. Large organisations, like the Big Lottery Fund who award funds from The National Lottery, have seized this opportunity. They have chosen SocialGO as the host for The Big Chat, an initiative to gather input from the public about how lottery funds should be distributed. On 16th March 2010 from 1pm to 3pm, the Chair of Big Lottery Fund, Sir Clive Booth, will be taking part in a live web chat.

Claudio Concha at Big Lottery Fund explains why SocialGO was ideal for the Big Chat, “We were looking for a solution that had the user functionality we required (user registration, live chat, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube feeds) as well as the ability to quickly rebrand the pages to suit our needs, all at a very reasonable cost.” Between now and 16th March you can send in questions for Sir Clive to answer online. “The built in registration / user account functionality and the availability of the chat module have been the greatest benefit to the Big chat and have enabled its rapid development.” He says.

As part of the Big Lottery Fund’s Welsh language Scheme, it was necessary to provide the site both in Welsh and English. They were able to easily enter the translated text in Gaelic on an identical page and then provide language tab links at the top of the page. They say this and other usability functions have made the site’s constuction a highly rewarding, hassle free process. “The ability to both drag and drop modules of pre-built functionality coupled with the flexibility of being able to completely customise the look and feel of the pages by crafting custom CSS code has made developing the site particularly easy.”

SocialGO are proud to be associated with the Big Lottery Fund that has already provided over £2.8 billion of funding for good causes. Why not sign up to Big Chat today and have your say on who should recieve lottery funding in the future.