Practical Drupal for Small NGOs

In October, I proposed an event called Practical Drupal for Small NGOs because I know some small NGOs that need a website, but they don't have enough budget to build one. These people usually have very interesting projects and do really good jobs. I thought it would be fun and practical to set up a regular Drupal event to help small NGOs build their websites.

Note we are not building websites *for* them. It's because I know a number of individuals and organisations who built websites for NGOs free of charge, but they worn out and completely abandoned those websites and stopped supporting. I didn't want to see that happen so I decided to ask NGOs to build and look after their sites by themselves, but we would do as much as we can to help them.

Due to the extra rubbish weather we had, some people couldn't come to Royal Festival Hall, which we chose as a venue. But things somehow worked out and we had the right ratio of volunteers and NGOs. Also the skillset of volunteers seemed sufficient. Here's the list of NGOs (or people who are helping NGOs with their website):

• British Dietetic Association
• Gizah
• Nightline Association
• Re-Evolve

I mainly worked with Ms. S from Re-Evolve, who has built a website of career service for young people by young people, using Ning. Because one of the main issues with the site was findability, I provided a consultation on information architecture and usability. We started off with a quick brainstorming session to list all the required content, then categorised them and came up with the best way to present them. We now have a much simpler and clearer structure. We ended up in not touching Drupal at all, but I think we did a good ground work to build a solid and user-friendly Drupal site. The session was quite intense that we both got a bit exhausted by the end but we were happy with the result.

For Nightline guys, I was hoping to have a volunteer with knowledge of CRM / system integration, as they are considering integrating their existing Drupal website with a CRM and would have found his help useful. But he was one of the guys who couldn't make it unfortunately. However mysty decided to be late for the party he was attending that evening and came to help us. Such a cool guy you are! They seem to have received some good advice from mysty and I hope they found the event useful.

Shawn was helping David from BDA, who came all the way from Manchester. He said it was worth coming all the way to London! Well done Shawn! We should probably let David know there is a brilliant Drupal community in his home town and he should attend their events too.

Robert Castelo was helping Gizah, who came all the way from Canterbury. He is helping his friends' NGOs in Africa to set them up with. Since Robert is my guru, I wasn't worried about Gizah at all (hence I didn't even bother asking Gizah how he was doing!). He also seemed to be very happy at the end of the event :)

Lessons from the event was that:

• We never have everyone who sign up so it can be difficult to support everyone
• Royal Festival Hall has a large screen in the Level 2, which we used for the event. They use this screen to do a live broadcast of the concerts they are having in the upper floor, which can be watched free of charge. This I find is a brilliant idea, but having an event there is not.

Some people who didn't sign up for the event mentioned they will be willing to support in subsequent events and I'm hoping we will have enough resource to suffice the demand for at least the next 5 months. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks so much everyone, especially volunteers for coming and hope to see you in the next event too!