A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

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:

• The Afghan Women’s Network (AWN)
• Kosova Women’s Network (KWN)
• The Women’s Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON)
• The Transnational AIDS Prevention among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe Project (TAMPEP), Turin Italy
• The Bosnian Family (BOSFAM)
• The Kosovo Young Ecologists
• The Roma Womens’ Network, Romania
• The International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), Geneva
• The Coalition for Work with Psychotrauma and Peace, Vukovar, Croatia
• The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CDES), Ecuador
• The Center for Humanitarian Cooperation, New York
• Grassroots International – Palestine
• The NGO Committee on UNICEF, New York
• The Indigenous Media Network, New Zealand
• Youth Against AIDS (YAA), London
• The Global Movement for Children, India
• The Forum of Srebrenica NGOs, Bosnia
• The Association for the Integral Development of the Victims of Violence in the Verapaces, Maya Achi (ADIVIMA), Guatemala
• The Roma Information Project
• The Jagaran Media Center, Nepal
• The Home for Human Rights, Sri Lanka
• eHomemakers (Salaam Wanita), Malaysia
• The Women’s Affairs Technical Committee, Ramallah and Gaza
• The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Jerusalem
• The Blind Education and Rehabilitation Development Organization (BERDO), Bangladesh