Blog: International Development

An Interview About In My Name's Online Strategy and Its Push to End Poverty

This week a consortium of international development organizations kicked off a campaign to end poverty that will push citizens to pressure their governments to advance the Millennium Development Goals. The campaign is called In My Name, and it has the support of Hollywood stars like will.i.am and Scarlet Johansson. Even with this star power, the campaign is using the internet as its main outreach tool. 

Last week I talked with Karina Brisby, the campaign's interactive lead,
about the online strategy behind In My Name. You can listen to the interview
here.

In My Name wants people to speak up by signing their name to the cause, and it's asking people to send in photos, videos, and stories (all through a nice workflow on a Drupal 6 website) and to spread the word to their friends via social networks. The campaign is also doing a lot to engage bloggers. It's opening up all its materials (even those star studded videos) for people to repost on their blogs, to translate, to riff on them, and to repurpose them however they'd like. It will be fun to see what mashups emerge. 

In Geneva? Come Out for Tonight's Drupal Meetup

Eric and I landed in Geneva, Switzerland this morning to talk with several humanitarian organizations about Drupal and how they can use it as a communications tool, and we’ll also be meeting up with some local Drupalers. Geneva is holding one of its first Drupal meetups tonight, and we’ve very excited to be able to attend. Much of the work done in Switzerland falls into the same focus as our work in Washington, DC – international development and particularly disaster relief – so we’re looking forward to discussing some common communications problems and ways people have used Drupal to solve them.

If you happen to be in Geneva tonight, here are the details on the meetup. We’ll also post our thoughts and some photos in a few days.

Monday, September 8th
7:00 pm
Nomades,
Rue des Grottes 18, 1201 Genève

Mapping on-the-ground public health organizations' capacity to respond to outbreaks

We just finished working on the Pandemic Preparedness Capacity Project, a new tool for InterAction and USAID that will be used to help prevent the spread of catastrophic disease outbreaks, especially bird flu. The goal of the site is to both improve both data collection from public health organizations on the ground and improve data visualization for policy makers here in Washington, D.C. We built this dynamic mapping portal on all open source software: the content management system is Drupal and the mapping stack is running on Mapnik, a C++/Python GIS toolkit.

We had a lot of fun working directly with Elizabeth Bellardo at InterAction, along with several other members on her team, to develop a strategy for making data collection, site administration and data presentation all incredibly simple. In addition to the strategy, we also did the site architecture, design, and development (of both Drupal and Mapnik). I want to use this post to show some of the behind-the-scenes details that are only available to the site administrators and the NGOs using the site.

Creating a Success Online Community that Gets Returns

Premal Shah, the president of Kiva, talked yesterday about some of the ways that Kiva's online platform engages people and has created a community of microfinance lenders and borrowers.

Kiva connects small business owners in developing countries with micro lenders around the world through an online platform. The business owners, usually working through their micro bank on the ground in their country, post information about their business, their business plan, and the amount of money they want to borrow to make it happen. Lenders around the world can go to the site, decide who they want to lend to, and then lend the money using their credit cards (and in amounts as low as $25). Borrowers then pay the money back to the lenders over time. 

It's a simple idea, and it's run on an online platform that facilitates the whole business. Premal ran through some of the strategy behind the system. Much of what he said echoes what we tell our clients who are trying to engage a community online and is relevant to every organization trying to do so. Here are a few of the points I find most important.

• Highlight the people in your community. Kiva posts big pictures of its small business owners along with their background, their business plan, and the amount they want to borrow, and lenders can create a profile that the business owners and other lenders can see. This goes a long way in helping people get to know one another and bridging the physical gap between them.

  It also shows off some of their successes.

Our Picks for Local Tech Events

It’s another busy week in DC for techies who must choose between a ton of interesting events taking place. Our picks for the week are below, and you can check out the full calendar of events is here. If you attend any of these events, be sure to stop by and say hi :)

Monday

DC Drupal Meetup: We’ll be here to talk about the latest Drupal projects we’re working on and see what other people are up to. This is a great event for all people who use or are interested in Drupal since the conversation won’t be overly technical.

Tuesday

Democratizing Development: How Technology is Disrupting Traditional Development Models. This event will look at whether technology will displace development organizations as it fuels person to person poverty fighting work, or whether donor agencies will use technology to benefit their work.   

NetSquared: Pimp my Nonprofit is back and this month the group will be revamping Global Giving's online image. 

Thursday

Party On...line with the RNC and DNC: Internet Advocacy Roundtable is bringing together online strategists from the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee for a talk on what they’re both doing online. 

Hope you can make it out to a few events this week!

Listen to the Podcast Interview: Open Source for NGO's

Yesterday Jason Wojciechowski from the UN Millennium Campaign interviewed our own Eric Gundersen about his thoughts on how nonprofit organizations can use open source applications like Drupal for the End Poverty Blog. Eric talks, amongst other things, about how the accessibility of Drupal and some of its newer features like multilingual support make it a leading application for nonprofits of all sizes located around in the world.

Listen to the podcast.