While helping one African charity an idea occurred to me. In addition to the remote assistance I offer as stated below, I recently added help with finding volunteers, and now help with getting traffic to your charity webpages, in the hopes of attracting donors. I have been studying seo (search engine optimization – how to get traffic to your site and how to increase your site’s rankings in the search engines) for many years but I have little time to work on it, and when I do it is for my own service. But I’d be happy to teach how to go about it. For example, I am helping Albert find volunteers for his charity. Volunteers are good also because they could go back home after an exhilarating experience, spread the word, and by those means donors might be found. We used two good websites so far, but to that it occurred to post a message on lonelyplanet. That website is the world’s largest travel website and gets 3 million visitors a month. Albert’s charity is in Tanzania, so
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/forum.jspa?forumID=9&keywordid=51
would be a good place to post some sort of “advertisement”, like “If you’d like to explore our beautiful natural corner of this country, come join our volunteer program. We’ll feed you and show you the local culture. More info on our charity here: <weblink>”. Make sure the weblink is put correctly so that the link works, and you instantly give great seo benefit to your charity website. And because you are a charity these websites will tend to be more lenient in allowing you to get away with such weblinks in your forum posts. Not only is it beneficial to bring in foreign volunteers to your charity, but placing these little “advertisements” in different and key places around the internet will bring in increased traffic and push your site up in the rankings. There are many tricks concerning this. Obviously an internet connection is required, and it is boring and repetitive work, but it can yield desired results, and whoever learns how to do it can eventually earn some money from it!
Karel
Thank you for your interest in our charity. At the moment I am still accumulating funds to start the first project, in the meantime I would be happy to help out remotely.
Quick mission statement: to help set up a solar panel system in remote villages, complete with desktop, LED lighting, soccer/football, and the knowledge and training to educate yourselves through and about the computer and earn a living through it.
Ways that I can help remotely:
- technical assistance how to accomplish the above mission statement or any other technical assistance
- make webpages for your organization (for samples check out the “Accomplishments so far” section near the bottom of http://africa-charity-project.org/progress.html)
- teach you how you can direct traffic to your charitable website for the purpose of finding donors
- help find you volunteers, such as I did for http://translationstop.com/sadani-africa-charity/?page_id=40.
- teach you how you can make your own webpages or earn a living through the computer
- teach you how you can put together your own solar/desktop system. For example, you can order used or new computer parts and solar cells cheaply from ebay, putting them together into desktops and solar panels using local materials. The desktops can be converted to 12V to save on having to buy inverters and transformers/converters, since the individual computer parts and solar cells operate on the same 12V system. LCD panels are also available that operate on 12V. After that you need a regular car battery (the bigger the better) and a regulator, the entire packaging costing roughly $500 or more.
Since I have a good internet connection and the know-how to use it, because I taught myself everything I know from it, I can use my time to research and prepare information that you can read offline on your computers. So far I have put together this freely downloadable package:
http://africa-charity-project.org/free-educational-program/
If you are a similar charitable organization to one I helped above I can make a website etc. for you as well, following the same template. Or a different style on a separate subdomain, such as
yourwebsite.africa-charity-project.org
to which you can have FTP access and manage yourself, with the necessary training.
Alternatively, for $13 a year you can buy your own domain, such as yourwebsite.com, and have the same privileges above.
If you would like to learn of occasional updates concerning our progress you can subscribe to