NGO Post is proud to announce its new team contributors in the form of a featured writer, Ashwin, and also moderators for three of the 15 categories of stories and posts on NGO Post. Moderator candidates are still solicited for the 12 other categories. Our featured writer, Ashwin, has been contributing great stories on NGO Post and in a combined enthusiasm from the NP (NGO Post) team and Ashwin, he has become our first featured writer who will contribute regular stories and links on NP! We look forward to more of our great users to become featured writers on NP, giving our audience a wholesome experience of dedicated stories for issues in focus. Here is a short bio of Ashwin:

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Ashwin Krishna is currently heading the India chapter of Juniper Networks Foundation Fund. He also has volunteered for Divya Deepa(http://divyadepatrust.org), a grass roots Non Profit working for empowerment of Rural Children. He is currently working on an idea to build a platform where Funding Agencies, Non Profits, Social Entrepreneurs, Corporate and Government will work together for India’s Development. A budding social entrepreneur, he dreams to set up an university, with a focus on Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation. He wishes to empower a million rural youth and their families.

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Our new feature of having moderators for each category of stories is planned so that each category on NGOPost has its own focused development and its moderators can follow the stories more closely to develop a close knit community around that category. This community can be intertwined with other communities on NGOPost and can lead to an organic growth and sharing of resources and knowledge on NGOPost, one of the primary goals of this platform. Our three new moderators for three categories on NGO Post are:

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• Adarsh will moderate the category Environtment and Ecology. A short bio pic of Adarsh:

Adarsh, is a native of Mysore, and has been involved with various nonprofits. She strongly believes that collaboration between nonprofits, individuals, and the government is essential to address complex issues that we face today. She likes to read, travel and listen to music. An avid tennis fan and follower of all things Federer! She has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, a Master’s degree in Communication and currently works in a FDA – regulated industry. She believes that everyone can make a difference and hence her blog is aptly named “eksparsh” http://eksparsh.wordpress.com

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• Aish will moderate the category Governance and Infrastructure. A short bio pic of Aish:

Aishwarya Mishra works as a software quality analyst for Pramati Technologies. Prior to this, he worked for Satyam Computer Services, now Mahindra Satyam . He has graduated with a B. Tech (Computer Sc. & Engg) from Cochin University of Science and Technology. He developed interest in matters of social importance after his college. He is passionate about financial inclusion and education as two key areas of social development. He feels that there is so much work already done in the social sector that it has become imperative to harness the existing information to ensure that lots of well-meaning individuals do not end up reinventing the wheel. Aishwarya is a Rang De (rangde.org) think tank member. Rang De is a micro-lending organization and the think tank is a small group of well meaning individuals who help Rang De in its strategy and outreach activities. Aishwarya is an author @ http://thinkchangeindia.org and his personal blog is at http://wheredoiblog.blogspot.com

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Badhri will moderate the category Education and Training. A short bio pic of Badhri:

Social:  targetingtheroots.blogspot.com || thinkchangeindia.org || ngopost.org ||
Personal: blacknike.blogspot.com || overtea.blogspot.com ||
Humour:  comedydaze.blogspot.com

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Also, same updates are being made on NGO Post’s facebook profile updates. Do join the NGO Post community to get updates from NGO Post at your profile page.

Hi All,

The NGOpost team deeply mourns the sad happenings in bombay over the last week and condolences to all the victims. We pay our tribute to the heroes who lost their lives fighting the terrorists and wish the best for all the injured victims for recovery.

The NGOpost blog has been in hibernation for sometime while our team has been working on better and more useful features for NGOpost. We have new developments on NGOpost since the last month. Firstly, we have a list of all available RSS feeds on NGOpost at a new page:

http://ngopost.org/feeds.php

We also have two focus of the month issues on NGOpost since September. The focus of the month for October was Education. The focus of the month for November was Food and Water. There are been many good stories and discussions in each of these categories with very good suggestions for NGOs to improve their skill sets and also reports of great NGO work in the corresponding areas.

There are going to be many more new features on NGOpost in the recent future to enable and facilitate more interaction amongst our enthusiastic users. As we await these new features eagerly, wish all our readers and users and everyone a safe and peaceful world.

NGO Post is growing, and with this comes the extra responsibility of ensuring quality and regularity of stories and discussions. Instead of regulating it all ourselves, we are going to partner with our most enthusiastic and knowledgeable users who will act as Category Facilitators.

Each of the categories (areas of social work) covered at NGO Post will have a facilitator who will be responsible for the overall health of that category. The facilitator will be in-charge of the category and will be responsible for its success.

Responsibilities

• Visit the category regularly to ensure proper quality, formatting etc of stories in that category
• Encourage discussions on the stories in that category – this may include sending messages to users who are likely to be interested in those stories
• Post stories if there are not enough story submissions from other users to keep the category consistently active
• Generate awareness about your NGO Post category amongst external blogs, mailing lists and other social-network communities to bring in new users and content

Minimum qualifications

• Have a natural interest in the chosen category – prior experience in that field is helpful, although not necessary
• Be an active user at NGO Post – so that you can “teach by example”
• Should be able to visit the site regularly

Would you like to become one?

• Turn your interest in social work into a highly productive and useful endeavor
• Help NGO Post in becoming better – we also recognize your contributions by highlighting the facilitators on our team page.
• Get the experience of building and sustaining an online community for social work

If this matches your interest and you would like to considered for a Category Facilitator in any category, please send us an email (parul@ngopost.org).

Hi! Once again, NGOpost has beat itself in making the web interface more user friendly for users. Helping people connect with fellow changemakers was one of the key motivations behind NGO Post – so now it has its own brand-new suite of features to take interactions on NGOpost goes to the next level!

Some of our many new features are:

• User profiles -  Please update your profiles with bigger photos of yourselves and information about yourself like where are you located, areas of interest etc. This will help other users interested in specific issues and locality find you.

• Subscribe to discussions on any story – You will automatically get subscribed to email notifications for any story that you post or discuss. You can also subscribe to any other story, as well as unsubscribe from it (the link is below the story title – where tags/category are).
• Location for each story- You can now tag the stories you post with a particular location. If it is a local NGO working on a locally relevant issue or tag it as a national story where it is relevant to India or global, where it is relevant to everyone! This helps users choose their span
• Quick filter toolbar - Lets you easily view users and stories in any location and category
• Users can follow other users – You can follow the latest activities by your friends from your profile page. You can also see people who follow you.
• Activity updates – users profile shows their recent activity updates. Your profile shows updates of all people you are following.
• Message book – Want to contact a user? Leave them a message! Users get email notifications for messages addressed to them

Here is a sneak preview of the new user profile page:

God

Hope all of you will enjoy and utilize these new features to the fullest. Now that its easier to message each other on NGOpost and share our views, we hope the NGOpost community grows into a bigger and closer knit family than ever before!

Share the care

NGOpost.org has instituted a Best Story award starting this fortnight. One story every fortnight will be selected by our panel of judges. The stories will be evaluated on various aspects such as Quality, Originality, Impact and Interaction. Details about the award, the judges and all the winners’ interviews can be found here.

The first Best NGO post award goes to: Vishal for his inspiring story:

http://ngopost.org/story.php?title=A_vision_to_create_a_better_tomorrow

Our team interviewed him to know more about what excites him to work and know about NGOs and then share this knowledge with the rest of us. We can read his wonderful and inspirational interview here :

http://ngopost.org/winners.php?p=1

Thank you, Vishal, for that wonderful post and thank you, judges, for the great work in choosing amongst so many wonder posts we have been getting lately. Hope all of you keep posting better and more useful articles in the coming days, so that the job of the judges becomes more and more difficult!

Good wishes,

From the NGOpost team

As NGOpost grows into its adulthood, it keeps growing these great applications that all of us will love to use! We have a new feature called the “bookmarklet” – making story submission faster!

This new feature on NGOpost is a link that you can bookmark on your favorite browser Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera.

Please get the bookmarklet from here.

Are you tired with the current state of media reporting? Do you want to share stories about social change on a global platform?

As most of you know by now, NGOpost is a web based community for sharing news and ideas about various social welfare initiatives. In loose terms you can refer to it as “orkut” for people who are interested in making a difference.

NGOpost is actively seeking writers, who are keen on creating something which would have far reaching benefits.

Some simple questions answered.
Do I need to have writing experience?
Not necessary. As long as you know English and can form meaningful sentences it should fine. 

What do I have to write on?
Write about the social change you see happening around you. Or write about the change that is needed. It could be interviewing someone who is silently doing great work, and whose work would be an inspiration for others, or it could be an organization doing great job in its respective field. There could also be generic articles like Open education tools available for schools or benefits of organ donation. Otherwise we have list of unending topics which we want people to write on, you can choose from them.

What is the benefit for me in writing for NGOPost?

• NGOpost has readership in 150 countries around the world and it has been increasing. Your article will reach hundreds of people every day!
• Each month we send out our newsletter, which goes to about ~5k people. Your name will featured there along with the link to your profile. Personally if you are a blogger, that would give your blog a lot of visibility.
• More than all this it is the satisfaction of writing about something, which would be of use to hundreds of people. We keep getting feedback how reading some articles on NGOpost helped them solve their own problems and helped them connect with relevant people.
• Going ahead we are working on the partnership with print magazines/newspapers wherein selected articles from NGOpost will get published there. Hence there is a possibility that your article might go in print .

So Join the band wagon of people who are keen to make a positive difference. If you are interested or have further queries write to us at goli-at-ngopost-dot-org

NGO post has started a new feature: “Focus of the month” , where one category on NGO post will be highlighted. Stories and discussions on this category will be highlighted for a month and people working with NGOs related to this category will be invited to share their experience and also hold discussions for best practices in these fields of work done by NGOs.

There are so many NGOs helping so many people and trying to solve so many different problems, that there came a point in time when the NGO post team started debating whether concentrating on so many different issues would get us to where we want to be (A platform that helps all NGOs help all NGOs)! We concluded that concentrating our extra energy and outreach into one category every month might actually provide a conducive environment for productive engagement in that sector. And then we will rotate the category every month, to cover all our cateogries in due course. So here comes the focus of the month feature.

This month’s focus will be on “Education & Training” and all posts and articles related to education will be highlighted on NP (NGO Post). We encourage everyone to continue posting articles of interest to them on NP as usual in all categories, but also please do see if there are any NGO related articles or posts regarding education that interest you and post them on NP for all our users!

Hope all of you are having a great summer. We are having a great time trying to improve on NP and cater to all the needs our users have!

Do you write a blog on a subject that may be of interest to NGO Post readers? If yes, we have now made it easy for you to have your blog posts shared on NGO Post. All you need to do is to add a small piece of code in your blog as described below.

Advantages

• A small button appears on your every blog post that tells whether that article has been shared on NGO Post and how many votes it has received.
• Readers of your article can directly submit to NGO Post by clicking on that button from your blog.
• If your article is already submitted to NGO Post, readers can vote it directly, so that your article is promoted on NGO Post.
• By virtue of being shared at NGO Post, your article is now read by a large number of readers there, making it much more useful. You can also get useful feedback from the NGO Post users.
• Your article on NGO Post links back to your blog, so you can expect an increase in the number of visitors to your blog!

The image below shows how the button may look in your blog post:

Step-by-Step guide to adding NGO Post button in Blogger (Blogspot)

1. Login to your Blogger Dashboard. Under Settings-> Archiving, set the “Enable Post Pages?” to “Yes” and save the settings.

2. Under “Layout”, click the “Edit HTML” tab. Block copy the entire HTML code for your site and save it in a text file as a backup. If anything goes wrong during the process, you can copy it back to go back to your existing configuration.

3. Click the box next to “Expand Widget Templates”. Scroll about two-thirds down the template (or use the Find functionality in your web-browser) to look for the code that reads: <data:post.body/>

4. Replace <data:post.body/> by

<div style=’float:right; margin-left:6px;’> <script type=’text/javascript’>
submit_url=&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;; </script> <script src=’http://ngopost.org/evb/button.php’ type=’text/javascript’/> </div> <data:post.body/>

5. Click on “Save Template”. That’s all. After this, each of your blog posts should show an NGO Post button.