Howard Lake

Digital #fundraising entrepreneur: founded UK Fundraising ( in 1994 & sold it 2022. See @ukfundraising & @goodjobsuk. Now Giving X Ltd.

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

40 years ago today I started cycling from Land's End to John o'Groats with my friend Mark.

A levels were done, we were 18 and fit, we had a tent, two racers, a map of the UK, a sense of the prevailing winds, and I had money in a Post Office book.

[Russell Hargrave @Hargraver]

Oof, bad news in charity world. @DebAllcockTyler one of the sector's most engaging commentators

https://t.co/txrVnzK8NR

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

A joyful piece that I wish were true. Truly fine writing.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Localgiving @Localgiving]

Great to see the latest Community Matters Fund from @NationalGridUK featured on @ukfundraising . Many thanks for spreading the word @howardlake ! The deadline for applications closes on 14th October, so hurry!https://t.co/TlyIdXmbAt

[John Turner @johnturner]

Your AI just learned WordPress.

To celebrate, I'm giving away a year of WPVibe Power ($299 value).

To enter:
1. Repost this
2. Reply with the one thing you'd change on your WordPress site

Winner picked at random Friday.

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@hendopolis So sorry to hear that. I really valued and enjoyed Tomorrow’s Papers Today, and Embargocat’s occasional appearances.

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@corrin_stacey Congratulations! It has changed what I do, can do, and hope to do with my website. The boundaries have just disappeared!

[michaeljfox.org @MichaelJFoxOrg]

So… your friend has Parkinson’s.

Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox share advice on how best to be there for someone with Parkinson’s, from navigating changes in handwriting to staying connected and helping counter social isolation.

Learn more about how you can help find a cure for Parkinson’s on our website. https://t.co/BjmqHcfk51

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@johnturner Looking forward to it. Pretty (very!) happy with what’s already there.

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@infiniteuploads @GoInfluenceWP @BlakeWhittle7 Thank you. Uploading the images and videos etc now. With 33 years of publishing my site, it’ll take a while. Thanks for the opportunity!

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@OriSilver AGI

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@lukepierceops I’m curious to see the case studies. The original document is so clear and useful. Thank you.

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@PaulineCoxy I’m very sorry to hear this. My best wishes to Pauline’s family and friends.

[Imagination Library @dollyslibrary]

She was always proud that her little program grew into what it is today. She was proudest of what it meant to her Dad. In her own words: "My Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done." (cont)

[John Turner @johnturner]

WPVibe just passed 9,000 active installs on WordPress .org

10K here we come. Join us on our journey to make WPVibe the stellar way to connect WordPress and AI.

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@johnturner The WPvibe realisation for me came when not only did I get a detailed SEO analysis but it was followed by the offer to go ahead and make those changes! Till then I’d had to figure out how to implement SEO fixes myself, mostly one at a time. Not anymore!

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@Timseo_ Yes please. I have a 30+ year old site that could benefit from that after several redevelopments.

[Paul Vengeons @VengeonsP]

Claude vient de sortir les "Skills".

On en a créé 10 pour le SEO.

Voici comment transformer Claude en équipe SEO complète :

(sans code, sans clé API)

La plupart des gens utilisent l'IA pour le SEO comme un chatbot.

Tu poses une question, tu obtiens un conseil générique, tu copies-colles, tu recommences.

Le souci : ce conseil n'est pas basé sur TES données, et il ne fait pas le boulot à ta place.

Seul souci : La plupart des gens font encore leur SEO à l'ancienne, lentement, à la main.

Voilà ce qui se passe généralement :

→ Ils jonglent avec 5+ outils SEO qui ne communiquent pas entre eux
→ Ils paient 100€+/mois pour des dashboards qu'ils n'ouvrent presque jamais → Ils copient-collent entre ChatGPT, Search Console et des Google Sheets toute la journée
→ Ils obtiennent des "best practices" génériques qui marchent pour personne → Résultat : des heures de boulot inutile, zéro mouvement réel sur les positions

Ce n'est PAS comme ça que le SEO devrait marcher en 2026.

Les Claude Skills changent tout. Chaque skill est un expert SEO spécialisé qui lit tes vraies données et fait le boulot. Toi tu fais juste glisser, déposer, et demander.

Les 10 skills que tu reçois :

On-page & contenu :

→ meta-optimizer : réécrit les title tags + meta descriptions qui se font vraiment cliquer
→ internal-linker : trouve les pages orphelines et suggère des liens depuis ton contenu existant
→ content-gap : compare ta page au top 10 des SERP, te dit ce qui manque
→ schema-generator : génère un balisage schema valide pour n'importe quel type de page
→ cannibalization-finder : repère les pages qui se battent pour le même mot-clé

Technique & GSC :

→ gsc-auditor : récupère tes données Search Console, fait remonter les quick wins
→ ctr-booster : trouve les pages avec beaucoup d'impressions mais un faible CTR
→ robots-checker : détecte les problèmes d'indexation avant qu'ils te coûtent du trafic
→ keyword-clusterer : regroupe tes requêtes en clusters thématiques → backlink-analyzer : note ton profil de liens, repère les liens toxiques

Comment les utiliser :

→ Glisse le dossier que je t'envoie dans Claude
→ Connecte ta Google Search Console
→ Dis-lui ce dont tu as besoin
→ Il lit la skill, puis s'occupe de ton SEO

Pas de setup compliqué. Pas de clé API. Pas de code. Juste glisser, déposer, demander.

Ce que c'est : 10 experts SEO spécialisés qui tournent dans Claude, gratuitement.

Ce que c'est PAS : une énième liste de "meilleurs prompts ChatGPT pour le SEO".

-----

Tu veux les 10 skills ?

1. Follow moi
2. Commente "CLAUDE" en-dessous
3. Reposte ça

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@VengeonsP CLAUDE

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@Jacobsklug OS

[Howard Lake @howardlake]

@jordan_ross_8F OPERATE