Last week in E-mediat Yemen workshops

Last week of E-mediat workshop in Yemen carried a lot of learning targets in Videos and mobiles to enhance NGOs operation besides supporting the integrity of social media strategy. Participants were introduced to the idea of storytelling through videos and how that can support their objectives.  Therefore, they were taught on using Windows Video Maker to create videos with special effects. However, their knowledge level on creating videos was good so another program with better features was introduced too which is ‘Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum’. There was an activity conducted in the workshops where all participants were divided into groups and each group made up its own scenario and recorded videos during training time then they added effects to those videos and shared them with others, following are some of these videos:

The trainer also created video with some effects to explain the idea of video contents, here's the video:

 There was also an explanation about skills and best practices of recording best videos with high quality. However, the challenge in this lesson was limitations in internet speed to upload videos on Youtube where it takes long time.

Another video was created by trainer too with some combined videos and photos were captured by participants where they talk about their experience in E-mediat, how E-mediat training is going to reflect on their NGOs, and some suggestions.

After that, another lesson was introduced to participants, that is using mobile phones strategically for NGOs. Trainees interacted well with this subject even though usage of social mobile phones still limited in Yemen. But, they were encouraged to go through those practices by linking to successful local examples.

Challenges in this subject were concentrated on finding usable mobile programs that are used widely in Yemen besides finding information about mobile phones’ usage in Yemen.

Last day in the workshop was a final discussion on pros and cons of the workshop training. In addition, each participant shared his/her application of social media strategy besides discussing about challenges that they faced and how to overcome them. They filled up some surveys that showed their satisfaction about the training and some of them are able now to deliver E-mediat subjects and lessons to other groups. Besides that, they created a network among their NGOs to connect all of them together. This network was named ‘B-Connected’ and it is going to link 15 NGOs in Yemen as first stage where they are going to create a social media strategy for this network. Another Facebook group was created too to be a platform to share and exchange information about social media in future.

Social Media For NGOs

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Second Week of E-mediat Wokshop - Yemen

First day on second week started with some energizers and reflection exercises to recall what was taught on the previous week, then an introduction about linking ideas to the strategy was given followed by quite time to list down those ideas and think about them properly to suit their strategies. Participants also practiced on blogging and writing some posts.

 In this day, an introduction about using Facebook strategically was given too and the trainer created a Facebook Group for all participants to share their questions that they think of while they are home, this group was used by the trainer also to share some useful resources for each lecture.

Day 2 in second week was all about Facebook pages and using them strategically to serve NGOs’ targets and goals. All participants created Facebbok pages for their NGOs and got to know how to work with Facebook applications and creating tabs besides started to work on their content strategy.

Participants finalized their content strategy on day 3 and some good practices from local NGOs were presented. After that, Twitter was introduced with all its usage practices and concepts. Each participant creates a Twitter account for his/her NGO and started twitting and following each other and other NGOs of their choices. However almost all participants did not have any idea about using Twitter, then went out of the session with great ability in using it besides they were glad for this new experience.

Day 4, was a completion session for using Twitter strategically for NGOs. Moreover, a new activity of conducting content strategy was held and finalized by general review for blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and other tools presented in previous sessions. This was done by some activities and group works.

Introducing story telling through videos was in Day 5. Many videos of local NGOs uses of videos were viewed and participants showed good ability in creating videos using some professional programs such as Sony Vegas, Adobe Premier, and Windows Video Maker besides quite ability of using After Effect for two of them. They were divided into small groups and each group created its own scenario and started recording videos. Then weekend is a chance for them to show some skills in editing those videos and adding some effects to them that are going to be shown and shared on the third week.

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First week of E-mediat workshop - Yemen

E-mediat Yemen team started its mission to conduct workshops of developing NGOs capacity in Yemen by providing fine training and resources on several subjects that are related with social media and online presence. The program was planned to start on June 2011 and lasts for 10 months, containing 5 main workshops. However, instability in Yemen caused some changes made the program to start later on the 31th of March 2012 with participants from different local NGOs in Sana’a city. This workshop training is conducted by trainer Ahmed Al-shami, under the supervision of SOUL for Development.

All participants attended the first day of training with passion and love of learning more about social media. They asked a lot of questions on incoming subjects and they were all too enthusiastic to indulge their NGOs in such a great capacity building even though, some of them already have good online presence. First day was a good starter for trainer and participants to icebreak and get to know each other well besides knowing overall agenda of coming days. The trainer conducted an activity that is an icebreaker for participants besides it is a way to introduce the meaning of social networks in a practical method. This activity was divided to 3 parts, each of which works with a single board attached with other 2 boards. The first board (Participants’ Profile) was meant to contain sticky notes placed by participants who wrote their names, NGOs’ names, and position. The second board (from me to we) or (Participants Interests), was used by participants to place 3 sticky notes that contain 3 words of interests for each. The third board (Participants’ Inquiries & Discussions) this is considered as the wall for all participants to place questions and share answers by using sticky notes. The overall idea of this activity is to show participants a practical way that would be used during all training days for sharing interests with the ability to share knowledge as well. Besides that, a new way to encourage asking questions and involving all participants to answer them in a small social network as the following diagram shows:

Participants were active in the beginning with this social network and as time goes by, the trainer kept encouraging participants to interact with the social network’s wall by asking them to place any question asked during training sessions and ask others to try to find any answer for this question, if they cannot then 

the trainer has to stick the answer

After that, another activity “Cases for Discussion” was conducted which is brainstorming and discussing on general principles of social media and online presence to introduce participants with concepts and ideas of the whole workshop. The activity started by distributing case’s card to each one then they have to discuss the cases with other group members. After that, the trainer displays a photo in the slides that is related to each case and asks trainees to identify whose case’s card match the photo, upon correct identification there is final discussion with the whole group for each case.

The rest of the day was presentations and group works on Networked NGOs and interactive assessment of online presence for each of the participating NGOs. All of the participating NGOs laid on the crawl and walk platforms.

Day 2 was an introduction to the social media strategy where participants got to know all concepts of the strategy and linked them to implementing it for their NGOs. Besides that, principles of social media tools were presented theoretically noting that each of those tools is going to be explained practically in coming sessions. In addition, the concept of mapping was put into table and participants were divided to groups to draw their own social communication maps as photos below show:

In day 3 participants played the social media game and got to work on implementing their own social media strategy according to idea that they got from the social media game and other activities on the previous two days.

Online listening and its tools were presented and practically worked on labs in day 4. Participants went out of this session with the ability to use Google alerts, Social Mention, IceRocker, and Twitter Search. They were able to identify a lot of key words suiting their NGOs and different projects. However, there was a problem in this session with using SocialMention.com that is unable to support search in long Arabic key words. The trainer has posted this problem in the E-mediat Facebook Group and got feedback that socialmention does not support Arabic language.

Day 5 was a session to create awareness among participating NGOs about security and privacy in social media tools and using internet generally. Many tools were practically presented and participants discovered a lot of ways to keep their online presence secure and private. Besides that, concept of blogging was introduced with its practical implementation where all participants created blogs for their NGOs except one of them who had been using blogging before and she just was taught about the correct steps to keep that blog active.

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