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Description
Public trust is the main resource of civil society organizations (CSOs) to achieve public change. The organizations themselves point out that the unfavourable media environment and their own low capacity for public presentation are serious challenges. Our strategic goal is to improve the capacity and sustainability of CSOs by building the necessary conditions to boost public trust in them. Our specific goal is to raise the awareness of citizens about the role of CSOs in the public. The project will provide the NGO Portal in Bulgaria (the main communication channel), the social media and partners’ websites with professionally developed texts and videos showing the practical benefits from NGOs and the challenges in their work. Six regional correspondents experienced in content creation will be hired for the Portal. With the methodological help from an experienced reporter, they will prepare stories about the work of 102 organizations and will help them create at least as many materials of their own. The 30 best texts will be published in a collection. Following a competition for a brief video, we will present the activity of at least 10 CSOs and will train at least 300 civil activists to create attractive video content. 11 in-depth interviews with renowned professionals will present the legal aspects of CSO activity in important but not highly known areas. The Portal will be technologically upgraded and users will be even more actively encouraged to publish in it. The legal website will have updated reviews and reference part regarding CSOs and their activity. (5) The target groups are CSOs/NGOs and the end user will be the general public. We will cover more than 250 NGO users of the updated Portal (more than 120 of them taking part in the project activities) and more than 350 000 unique visitors of the updated Portal, 60 000 of them being the audience of the created texts, videos and the Legislation website.
Summary of project results
The strategic goal of the project was to improve the capacity and sustainability of Bulgarian NGOs by crating prerequisites for increasing the public trust in them. The materials created thanks to the project’s funding, on the one hand, helped increase the capacity of NGOs by providing them with models for public presentation, access to practising journalists, regular information on legislative changes related to NGOs and civic participation, updated legal reference tool related to NGOs, video lessons and a competition for amateur videos. On the other hand, the newly created content and the newly provided opportunity for NGO users of the Portal to publish text, video and image galleries, presented to the general public the wide variety of topics and approaches of Bulgarian NGOs in achieving positive change in various aspects of social development. A team of 6 regional correspondents got selected and engaged with the Portal, who covered the activities of NGOs all over Bulgaria and helped them to create their own materials. Stories about and from NGOs, created by and with the help of correspondents. Reached were 102 organizations across the country, created over 200 materials, which were read by over 60,000 people (link to the materials).