New Media for NGOs, January 2010 - overview

 

Dates: January 24-29, 2010
Location: Prague, Czech Republic

Who attended the New Media course?
TOL courses always attract a great international mix of participants, and this course was no exception, with 21 participants from the non-profit sector in Europe, Africa and North America.

Practical advice for NGOs
Specially designed for the non-profit sector, the course addressed how to use new media tools to improve communication, internal management, and how to embrace blogs and social media in campaigns. Sessions included:

• How to manage a new media project (overall strategy, budgeting, staffing and resource requirements, philosophy - building it into the organisation's DNA, managing a technical staff - how to speak to your geeks, funding sources).
• Internal uses for digital tools (CRM, campaigns, grant reporting, online services in "the cloud", getting by without an IT staff, online tools for reporting, calls for proposals and proposal writing.
• Storytelling and why it's important for every NGO (campaigns, using case studies, blogs, social media)
• Hands-on afternoon sessions in content management (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla), communications (advanced Skype, Frontline SMS), customer relationship management (CivicCRM), knowledge sharing (Google Documents, MediaWiki), task management (Remember The Milk, Google Calendar) and image management (Flickr, Picasa, PHPGallery).

The trainers
The course was led by Douglas Arellanes, head of research and development at the Media Development Loan Fund's Center for Advanced Media in Prague. Guest trainers included Kevin Anderson, Suw Charman-Anderson and Dan MCQuillan. See the Trainers page for more details about the team.

Feedback

• 94% of the participants rated the course either 'very good' or 'excellent'
• All the trainers were rated as either 'very good' or 'excellent'.

And here's a selection of some of the participants comments:

"Easy to understand; inspiring and enabling. Opened up the possibilities and achievability."

"Thanks for everything you’ve done. Now I am totally Twitter, Facebook etc. educated."

"It was a very useful experience for me"

"The group exercise was great."

"Opened my eyes to the importance of social tools."

"I have several practical ideas already of implementing Facebook,Google Docs and maps applications!"

"I liked the course for the new practical ideas I got; even for things I seemed to know."

"Monday through Friday; it was great."

Photos can be seen here.

 

More Information
For information about TOL's journalism training courses or a customized course for your particular group, please contact Joann Plockova at plockovaj@tol.org