Using Blogs,
YouTube, and
Other Cool Tools
to Achieve Your Group’s Goals
Supported by Waikato University’s Management School, Waikato 2020 organised New Zealand’s first hands-on internet conference for community based organisations and voluntary groups on April 22, 2008.
About 140 people from about 70 community and voluntary organisations attended the workshop-based day called Engage Your Community: Using Blogs, YouTube, and Other Cool Tools to Achieve Your Group’s Goals. Rather than being a conference for “techies” the day provided a hands-on opportunity for staff and volunteers of participating organisations to learn how to improve their organisation’s effectiveness using innovative, simple, and user-friendly web-based tools. Demand for places exceeded expectations and demonstrated a demand for more of the same.
As a result Waikato 2020 supported Wellington and Rotorua’s ICT Trusts to host their own in recent months.
Workshops to provide follow up support; Waikato 2020 is currently offering a series of workshops to support tangata whenua organisations and the community and voluntary sector to set up and maintain WordPress and Moodle websites (for futher information visit www.wainet.org).
From Re-think, the Waikato Management School newspaper, author Alison Robertson.
There are a number of reasons why the not-for-profit sector has lagged behind big business and the public sector in its uptake of Information Communication Technology (ICT). It’s seen as expensive to use, there’s been a lack of expertise, and in some cases the technologies haven’t been seen as relevant to achieving goals.
But with the explosion of new, free or very cheap applications where most of the technical work has been done, there’s no reason why not-for-profits, community groups, iwi and the like should not be going the whole hog with ICT. Web2.0 in particular is all about community collaboration, social networks and sharing.
More than 140 people who work in the not-for-profit sector met in Hamilton for the first e-Engage Your Community conference. They went to learn more about using the internet and computer applications to better engage with their clients, collaborate with other groups, and improve their general effectiveness in administration and fund raising.
The day-long event was organised by the Waikato 2020 Communications Trust and hosted by Waikato Management School. The Trust aims to get more people connected, competent and confident in using new technologies, having already developed WaiNet (wainet.org) which provides free hosting and development of websites, blogs and virtual offices, and the New Zealand Webguide (www.weguide.net.nz), which provides guidance and advice to the sector on using the net.
The participants got the low-down on Skyping, pocasting, live streaming, how to use Basecamp, blogging, Moodle, Paypal, Wikispaces and more.
Management communication professor Ted Zorn, chair of the Waikato 2020 Communication Trust says while most in the NFP sector don’t have the budgets the size of Hayden Sanders for web projects, the principles of design and application are the same no matter the scale. “If the conference exposed participants to the opportunities and potential for ICT in their organisations, and if it gave them more confidence to embrace it more fully, then that’s certainly a successful start,” says Prof Zorn.