NetSquared recently followed up with the N2Y3 Featured Projects to develop these short case studies, with the goal to expand the knowledgebase of best practices for applying social media in the nonprofit context. We interviewed participants from the N2Y3 Featured Project teams to gain a better understanding of the way they used social media to increase their reach and carry out their missions. We are very happy to bring you their stories!

Today's spotlight: Assetmap Uganda!

Project Details:

• Name of Organization:   Assetmap: Uganda
• URL: Assetmap.org/Uganda
• Location: Evanston, IL / Kampala, Uganda  

Project description:

Assetmap Uganda is the pilot project of Assetmap Foundation, and is designed to help develop tools and processed by which local organizations in northern Uganda share information about their assets and needs in order to increase coordination and collaboration. In the process, Assetmap hopes to help local organizations more efficiently harness local resources and reduce external dependency.  

Social media tool or tactic used:

Online filtering tool  

How was it used?:  

The eventual idea is for these local organizations to have a simple portal where they can find resources available to them by virtue of their relationships with other local community organizations.

Step one is anthropological. In order to design the tool, the Assetmap Foundation needs to understand the types of information and resources Ugandan nonprofits already share and/or seem most willing to share, along with their current internet usage habits. Designing a tool in the absence of this information is almost sure to fail.

Step two is design. Armed with that information, the Assetmap Foundation will contract with Ugandan developers to build a web portal that makes use of off the shelf survey tools to collect data and simple filtering tools to allow groups to quickly identify others with complimentary assets and needs.

Step three is iteration. Even once the initial tool is built, it will take iteration and experimentation to understand which types of information are most useful to groups and which types of tools best fit with their current behaviors.

Outcome:

Assetmap had planned a much smaller scale pilot for the summer of 2008. This pilot suffered from grandiose ambitions, and trying to collect too much data, we had low rates of participation. Armed with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, they've reorganized that pilot with simpler goals and a design process that better respects current behavior. They are somewhere between Step one and two above and do not anticipate having clear "results" until mid-2009.  

Lessons learned:

Assetmap's enthusiasm for the web needs to be tempered by clear-headed analysis of how people actual want and need to use the internet. The value of new tools isn't always self evident and especially in international development, you're program will only be succesful if you meet people where they're at.

• See the full list of N2Y3 Featured Projects here.    
• Read all of the N2Y3 Case Studies as they are published.

The work to create this case study series was funded by a grant from the Packard Foundation.