Building and Maintaining with updates on Website of NGOs
Building and maintaining website:
NGOs at the community level are always busy in terms of their physical activities in transforming the target community. But updating the website about the recent programs events and the changes that are happening through their initiatives are not often well captured and reported in their own websites. Main reason for this is the technical gap in terms of usage of software. If approached to a website technological company the charges imposed are too large for NGOs to bear.
How would you overcome these challenges?
What are the suggestions you give for small grassroot level NGOs?
choosing tools & platforms strategically
this is indeed a big problem for lot of NGOs. most of them will not have easy access to technical people to setup software infrastructure to enable easy communication & collaboration.
the internet and what is called 'social media' seems to have some answer. (we had a workshop on it just today in Mumbai)
the internet has many free tools & platforms that makes it very easy for everybody to have a virtual presence.
some that i would like to mention are Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Orkut.. there are more of these. have you heard of them?? does your organization use any?
Let me take the example of Facebook - you can create a Facebook Fanpage for your organization and make multiple people its admin. They can then upload new data and content about your organization. This way your org & team does not worry about anything technical but can focus only on what content should be changed regularly. The platform supports photos & videos too. Your supporters can then become 'fans' of your fanpage.
Another very easy tool to communicate your organization's work on the Internet is Blogger. The interesting thing about these tools & the reason they are called social media is that they enable a two way communication between your organization, its donors, communities it serves, supporters and the general public.
Let me know if your are interested and we can discuss it further over phone.
Best wishes!