For me it is a curse. My fingers just can't type the same words that my brain thinks. So after any piece of typing I have to try and see where my fingers went wrong: a word missing, a letter mistyped, a punctuation mark in the wrong place. At school I managed once to achieve the accolade of five typos or grammatical errors in a single line of text. After that I put extra punctuation marks at the end of my work: telling the English teacher that he could add it where he thought it would go best. He was not amused.

Sadly with age my skills have got no better. However I now have to accept that it matters. An un-proofed document from me runs the same reputational risk as an un-serviced aircraft - my meaning may be lost, the reader may be distracted by my mistakes, or my scintillating words felled like a runner with untied shoelaces.

There is one effective way I have found to correct my own work. To find a quiet room and to read aloud what I have written and focus on every word and nuance. It's no good reading things over in my head. My mind wanders, I skip sentences, my brain knows what it's meant to see but it finds other things to do. Reading aloud (or asking somebody to proof my work) is the only thing that works.

I tell you all this because bad as I am at the small details I know they matter. And that's true for every communicator. Small mistakes in any communication have a disproportionately destructive effect. They act like a sort of reputational chewing gum on the sole of a shoe. So a misspelt name, an out-of-date website, a publication with the wrong number or just a few sentences of jargon-filled turgid text will potentially ruin whatever message you wanted to get across.

Don't waste hours of hard work for the sake of a few minutes checking. It just isn't worth it - even if my brain and fingers don't always see it that way.

Joe Saxton is chair and founder of CharityComms. In his day job Joe is driver of ideas and co-founder of specialist research consultancy nfpSynergy

As Joe says below, reputation is key, and that applies to both the press and public's view of us.

Clearly the web is an important part of building and maintaining that reputation these days and I hope I am preaching to the converted when I say that having a website is crucial. Not having one is like not having a phone number or not being listed in the charity commission as a registered charity.

But of course people need to be able to find it. It is critical that your web address (URL) is recognisably yours, whether you are known as your long name, initials or an acronym people must be able to find you by what they think you are called.

Finding you in a search engine is also key, and it is not difficult to make sure your site has the right description, title and keywords to get your site listed by how the public might search for you. Meta Tags may sound techie but they aren't, and if you haven't got them the best site in the world will not get listed.

But once people have found your site it is critical that they aren't immediately put off by out of date copy and old news. If you don't have the resources to update your site on a regular basis don't put time sensitive information on the homepage.

If nothing else gets done make sure you remove out of date events; there is nothing worse than visiting a site and seeing an event listed that ended months ago... it looks like a vacant shop, unused and unloved, and will cause huge damage to your reputation.

If you don't have lots of press releases and don't generate much news, don't put it on the homepage. We think it's a great idea to have, but if it isn't regularly refreshed it doesn't help make you look like the vibrant organisation you want to be seen as.

"Cut your cloth to fit your budget" was a phrase I grew up with, and in the case of the web it is better to build a site you have the time and resources to maintain than to spend budget on a flashy site which quickly looks out of date.

Sue Fidler, Director of Sue Fidler Ltd, providing e-consultancy for Charities.

I have spent a lot of my working life telling people how important an organisation's brand is. However in recent years I have become a reformed character. Farewell to branding and all hail to the importance of reputation. I have left branding behind for no other reason than that it is a term that sticks in the gullet of too many charity folk.

Tell somebody that they have a great brand and they think that they are being compared to a commercial brand - like a can of Coke or a type of mobile phone. Tell somebody that they have a great reputation and they cannot dispute that this is a good thing. The importance of a good reputation is something that everybody can see matters.

Reputation is like a kind of organisational physical fitness. A good reputation makes people read your press releases, take your phone calls, read your mailings, use your services or approve your funding bids. In other words, reputation lets you do the same things you have already done but faster, quicker, better and more effectively.

In communications, reputation matters more than in most areas of a charity's life. When people are surfing the net the right reputation will make them visit your site. When people are looking at a policy report the right reputation will make people take your work seriously. In the media the right reputation will make a journalist read your press release or ring you with a query.

So every organisation should know who is responsible for building its reputation and external profile, who else has contributory roles in building (or potentially ruining) its reputation. While some organisations appear to be effortless in maintaining their reputation, most of us have to work an awful lot harder.

Joe Saxton is chair and founder of CharityComms. In his day job Joe is driver of ideas and co-founder of specialist research consultancy nfpSynergy.