Presentations

The Internet is the biggest innovation in communications since the telephone. It's a medium which has gone from being a geek toy to and integral part of modern society and business in less than two decades. The Internet's usefulness to communities is built right in - right down to its core values of openness and freedom. Communities built the Internet, communities pioneered it, and communities need to keep it open for everyone.

Change is inevitable in any industry and the charitable/ community sector is no different. Nathalie will explore the ways that new technologies and communication tools are influencing best practice for donor engagement. She will highlight the exciting opportunities for organisations of any size to establish relevant relationships that have a real fit with organisational purpose, creating the connections necessary to assemble the energy and resource needed to make a niche difference in the world.

Great communicators have always known that the secret of spreading your messages is getting other people to telling your story. On the internet, this basic truth of communication is amplified one hundred times. The key to a great internet communication strategy is crafting your story so that it's easy for other people to tell, identifying the best potential story tellers and maximising their incentive to tell your story.

The increasing popularity of social media has meant that social networking is becoming an integral part of many non-profits' online strategies. But with our stretched budgets and limited resources, it's hard to know whether the rewards will be worth the effort. In this presentation I will discuss how Oxfam New Zealand is using social media to communicate with our online audience, and highlight both the challenges and opportunities that we face. There will be time for questions and answers at the end.

Increasingly, community & voluntary sector people are working collaboratively across organisational boundaries, and in order to communicate online inevitably they use email as the one uniting tool between those on different computers in different locations. This results in many iterations and long email trails, multiple versions of shared attachments/documents and an email flow that is far from easy to manage. Many find that there is no other tool that helps avoid the pitfalls of email, let alone one that meets their specific community group focus.

Ros Coote from the CommunityCentral project will share the experience of developing, promoting and growing the innovative online workspace, CommunityCentral, aimed at community & voluntary sector organisations to induce them to work closer together online. It’s a web-based platform developed by the sector, for the sector.

Ros will talk about the project from its inception to its now fully operational state where groups can take advantage of new tools and opportunities for interacting/communicating/managing their projects online to better connect. CommunityCentral is now profiling shared work on projects, newsletters, events, campaigns and is building a stronger sense of sector and collaborative leadership. It is attempting to improve electronic communication and e-engage using sophisticated, but easy-to-use interactive tools. It provides an email newsletter server, project spaces and interactive tools.

Ros will also share their experiences of getting people to embrace the new tools on offer, the feedback about the site and its usage as well as its planned future direction.

Terry will introduce Second Life and use videos to show how it is being used in adult education in New Zealand. Then using her avatar Tere Tinkel, she will take the audience on a journey in world to visit various locations which will show how it is being used by adult educators, virtual teams and community groups.

These days anyone can have a website - one that looks good and is relatively cheap to build. But in order for a website to actually be successful, it must meet the needs of your users.

Natasha will share some of her experiences and war stories as a user advocate. She'll outline ways to help you better understand what your users currently do and what they want to be doing and why. This will include usability testing and tips and tricks for site improvements - and all on a shoestring budget.