A Voice For the Voiceless

The Advocacy Project helps marginalized communities to tell their story, claim their rights and produce social change. We recruit graduate students to volunteer as Peace Fellows with partners.

The Impact of Service



"I look at myself as having the potential to be as strong and caring as the amazing women I met in Kenya."

Kate Cummings (Tufts University) volunteered in 2009 as a Peace Fellow for Vital Voices in Africa.

For more 2009 feedback click here.

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Services > Information Commu... > Website Support

Website Support

In this day and age, few campaigning organizations can afford to be without a website. AP has helped to design, or designed, websites for 19 partners. Taken together, they illustrate the richness and variety of AP's partners and also of the issues AP worked on.
 
There are important lessons to be learned from this work.

First, while websites are important advocacy tools, a community-based association may not need a website to be an effective advocate. Second, the type of site should be tailored to the needs of the organization. If an association wishes to post basic information about its work, it may chose to use a “brochure” site that does not need to be updated regularly. 

More sophisticated websites will need to be updated regularly and sustained, which will require different skills and capacities. AP has found that sites that are not sustained can damage a group’s profile and credibility. In addition, a website is only one tool in a larger advocacy and information strategy. This can easily be overlooked in the satisfaction of designing an attractive site.
 
AP seeks to help partners develop a web presence in three ways:

First, for organizations that do not possess websites, we recommend a wiki page that can eventually evolve into a website. AP offers a wiki template and AP Fellows are trained to help partners build a wiki page. Putting up a wiki page is easy and fun – and helps to provide basic training in the organization.

Second, all AP partners are offered a partner page on the AP website, which allows them to post their information (reports, newsletters etc) and reach a larger audience.

Third, AP can provide limited technical support for partners that have websites but still need technical support. Our main goal, however, is to help the organization develop its own capacity to manage and maintain its site, or at the very least to identify an eco-network of local tech support (trainers, eRiders etc.). 

AP has helped the following partner organizations to develop or upgrade websites:

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