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Description
The project will help solve one of the major problems facing NGOs, i.e. low public trust, registered by a number of surveys over the last years, through maintaining and upgrading the NGO Portal in Bulgaria (https://ngobg.info). The project will considerably improve public awareness about the role of NGOs in society by providing specific and verifiable information about NGOs through the Portal. The implementation of the project will boost NGO capacity for public presentation, something NGOs share to be a serious challenge for them together with unfavourable media environment. In the short term (the implementation period), the project will provide the NGO Portal with texts with diverse format and content: analyses, news, events, campaigns, ads, financing, which will show the public the real face of NGOs and the real challenges facing them and will help overcome numerous prejudices about the role and aspirations of civil society organizations. A new functionality will be added to the Portal, the publication of galleries of photos that can help us contribute more efficiently to raising awareness about what NGOs are and what they do in Bulgaria. The NGO Portal is a long-term strategic initiative. With its publicly available archive of all publications and its rich media content combined with a large source of information, the Portal will continue attracting a diverse audience regardless of its traditionally preferred information sources as well as researchers of the dynamics of the civil society in Bulgaria. As our readers often share, they learn not only about NGOs from the Portal but they start following it regularly to look for services from NGOs and opportunities to contribute to causes, etc.
Summary of project results
The project aimed to help solve one of the most significant problems facing Bulgarian NGOs – the low public trust registered by several surveys in recent years – through the maintenance and upgrade of the NGO Information Portal in Bulgaria (https://ngobg.info). The specific objectives of the project were related to improving citizens'' awareness of the role of NGOs in society on the one hand and enhancing NGOs'' capacity for public presentation on the other.
Through the Portal, the public learned about the practical benefits of NGOs through concrete examples, case studies and stories, a major contribution in this respect being the stories of the Portal''s six regional correspondents, who produced 42 stories on the work of different NGOs. The texts and photos were published on the Portal and shared via social networks. We published 15 of the best texts in the book "Chronicles of Good 2". The book is available in both paper and digital formats.
The correspondents'' texts were read nearly 9,000 times. The posts published by registered users and edited by the team were read over 375,000 times, and the quoted news, advertisements, etc. from external sources were read over 740,000 times.
The portal continues to enjoy the interest of government institutions, local authorities, schools, socially responsible businesses, etc., who seek us to disseminate information related to their initiatives involving NGOs.
The NGO Portal implemented 66 media partnerships. The Portal''s internship program continued as we worked with 8 interns from different disciplines and universities. The total number of internship texts for the reporting period was 24.
The impact on the main target group (NGOs) was related to their increased capacity to present themselves publicly through text, and to providing ongoing information on important legislative issues and changes related to NGOs. The Portal helped NGOs to increase their sustainability by informing them about funding opportunities and serving as a platform through which NGOs can seek promising members of their teams.
During the project period the Portal was visited by over 630,000 people, with over 1 million pages visited.
84% of the organisations for which we published stories noted that working with the correspondents had helped them to a large and very large extent to increase their capacity to publicly present their work, accomplishments, and challenges.