Hello All

Following the invitation I sent out inviting neighbours to join our village, I have two replies offering to donate money. I am sure there will be more.

There is an urgent need for us to set up this website. I am therefore taking responsibility for this task. Had already discussed with Jaya anyway about the need.

It should be up in a few days and please we all need to get on board and make the site busy.

Regards
Onye

What do you want to include in a web site? What info do you want to promote? do you have images and photos?
-Jack

Most charities I find online list financial statements so donors also can see where their money legitimately goes. Here is an example.

https://secure.invisiblechildren.com/media/pdfs/ic_2006_financial_statem...

It may also be helpful in establishing some of the areas you will need to set up, budget for etc to help give you some ideas.

To accept payments online via paypal, you first must contact them www.paypal.com and see if your country is restricted or not, if it is not you can set up an account to collection donations in single lump sums or subscription donations where the person gives monthly and the donation is automatically taken from their account and put into yours. You must have a bank account in order to with draw the funds.

If you have 60 families that is a small number and I think each family if they agree should be feature on the site so it is more personal and you can update their progress, problems etc people are more willing to donate when they see where and to whom their money is going.

You will also want to link this group from your site so others can join.

www.cafepress.com you can set up logo merchandise to sale online from your site and make profits. That is in the USA and would also require a bank account to collect funds.

Pages on your site that are informational on the people, traditions, handicrafts, videos songs etc are also good. Please see some videos we have done in Morocco

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=moroccantreasures

You will need someone to donate a digital camera, and it also helps to get a company to sponsor your internet bill.

When you start a co-op you will need a logo.

I will try and come up with more ideas, Im 31 weeks pregnant and may be avaliable often or not but you may email me anytime and I will be happ to help when I can

I work with a co-op in Morocco and own www.moroccantreasures.com those videos, etc and I am located in the USA I also own www.moroccancards.com free vitual online cards just like free advertising to get people to go to our site, www.moroccantubetv.com a links page linked from our site and we get paid cash parking from clicks and www.moroccantreasurestyle.com a drop shipped retail and wholesale site to try and generate funds to cover my expenses while helping build that villiage in better future business.

Hope some of this helps
Kind Regards
Heather Haney
moroccantreasures@hotmail.com

Hi Jack

This is good. Thanks so much for kicking off discussions on this task. Jack, I like what Heather has put together. You can see my comments on these.

Regards
Onye

hi...i just received an invitation to join reddigudem n i wud be glad 2 help....if i cud just get d details as to what is r next step...i wud get 2 work instantly..
Regards,
Anushka

Dear Heather

This is brilliant. Infact the idea of profiling each family sounds very good. Jaya, the local rep will have to let us know how feasible this is.

Heather, congratulations. Is this your first, if I may ask? Your ideas are brilliant. Jaya and I had discussed the website for raising funds but it never occured to me we could use it in such an elaborate way.

The domain, www.reddigudem.org has been registered and phpnuke installed on it. But I have not followed it through because I was anxious to restart the project and get people like yourselves involved. Now that I have these ideas, I'm going to do some work on the site. I had not even informed Jaya that it was now set up. Thanks Heather for forcing my hand :-) but I like it.

As you can see, I've done the ChipIn registration as well to collect donations. I did phone PayPal this morning and they confirmed it was ok, so that is covered.

Everything is just going so fast, I need to catch my breathe. Please keep the ideas coming. Thanks.

Best wishes
Onye

If you visit our videos you will have a good idea on the marketing behind the fun, helpful and educational videos we list for free on www.youtube.com we also include our website name and logo so all the people will remember and visit it. Like free advertising and they can even embed our videos on their own websites which means more people can watch them.

This makes the villiage more well known, and also is educational and advertises the cause or business.

When you list families do they have seperate needs or needs as a whole as far as the villiage as a family. What I mean is will they be farming, rasing animals as a joint unit or individual families?

To inspire group unity and positive amibition you may want to call a meeting and have the village vote on some people to be in charge of different areas in the project themselves. It will make them feel empowered and give them something helpful to do, dream, discuss and accomplish and when you go for updates for the website and project in general it will be a more organized system.

I will keep thinking of ideas, I hope some will be useful

Heather

Heather,

You have definitely provided some great ideas for the website! I think that highlighting the families on it is a great idea because like you said, it will personalize it and perhaps motivate people towards action.

We also need to think about generating traffic to the site. If we have a video created, we can certainly call out the web address so people will be compelled to log in. I also think it would be good to have the website's link advertised on other sites, so people could click through easily? I am not positive about the rules and regulations of other sites when it comes to this, but is it worth looking into?

Best,
Seema

You can do a link popularity search on any domain name, and the more times the site is linked the better search engine ratings it has.

You can search online and find similar sites and email them a nice personal letter requesting they add your site in their links section.

You can also join online forums and as long as not spamming post links there.

You can also do a link exchange and have a page for links on the site and offer to list their link in exchange for them listing yours.

Heather

Hi Heather

Thanks for your contributions. Please, are you familiar with phpnuke?

Regards

Onye

Sorry I am not and I dont know what it means either

Heather

For all my websites I use

www.godaddy.com and their really easy to use pre-made templates that are easy to customize

Heather

Dear Mrs.Haney,

I am K. Jayanand, Local Representative of Reddigudem village and extending my heartful thanks for your interest and willingness to put your valuable efforts to resolve the issues of Reddigudem village. Really your ideas and suggestions are brilliant. Hope with all your cooperation and guidance we will raise the necessary financial resources for taking up water conservation structures in Reddigudem village.

Once again thank you very much for your response and hope the same cooperation will be exteded in all our future endeavours.

Regards
Jaya

Hi Jaya

The idea suggested by Heather of profiling the families is a good one. Please could you look into this. It may be a good idea to call a village meeting to discuss this. If we can get about 10 - 15 families to agree to the pilot, I'm sure others will join later. Let us have a feedback as soon as possible.

Heather, could you give us a bit more detail on this.

I may need to set up a separate task on this aspect of the web development.

Thanks again everyone for your contributions.

Regards

Onye

I would choose a range of people for the families, old, middle aged, young, some with children etc. This way each profile will be a little different and more interesting for the viewer. It also allows for a range of different topics to focus on.

Edlerly, they can talk about the old ways, traditions, how they contribute to the family or villiage even if it is only passing on traditions and keeping old ways going to the young as that is a very important role. Do they rely on the younger relatives or villiagers to supply their food, care, house repairs etc. Are any old way doctors? Do they craft or make anything? Traditional songs. Affects of lack of water on elderly

Middle aged, how things have changed since the elderly ran the villiage, what they do for work or to pass the time, any contributions, traditional foods, textiles their role in the villiage. Their home, roles of women and men and are they changing. Hunting, farming etc. Affects of lack of water.

Young couples, their role in the community, any extra burdens? Traditional dances, textiles, crafts, ways the weestern world or depeltion of forestry has affected their villiage. Did they get an education? How they desperately want better for the elders and new generation but they have no opportunities etc, show thier kids, childrens songs, playing any roles the kids have in helping to sustain the villiage.Hunting farming, etc. Affects of lack of water, what they have to do to get water. daily chores with what little water they have.

Leader of the villiage,
Main teachers,
Main medical care providers even if an elder or medicine person
Do some travel to large cities to work and send back money?
Do some travel looking for work and not return.
Any agencies supply food, free healthcare, medical checks, dental or vision checks? Any trucks bring in water? Any mode of transportation beside walking to get water?
Any agency funding seeds, farming animals for the villiage?

You dont have to list everything for each family, just mix it up so it is informative and touches on all issues over the course of the listed families. Even if the answer is no, state that NO agency is currently helping prvide farm animals etc. So others see they really need help.

The families should be protrayed as loving, with traditions, family values, happiness even though they have a need for basic necessities they are a strong unit as a villiage to stick together and try to improve the living standards for the current and future generations they just need help to do so.

Just a brain storm I hope some of it will be useful

Heather