NGOs explore social media, win awards

The three winners in the category best use of social web were Food and Trees for Africa; South African History Online; and Media and Training Centre for Health, while Cell-Life won the best use of mobile technology category. Three of the winners received prizes to the value of R10 000 each, sponsored by Torque-IT, while Telamenta sponsored an additional prize specifically for South African History Online.

Speaking at the event on Wednesday, 21 October 2009, Jan Moolman, manager of SANGONeT's Civil Society Information Programme said, “The quality of the entries and the number of organisations with Facebook pages and Twitter feeds has grown significantly since last year.”

Moolman also pointed to the increasing trend of using social media to complement the primary web presence. “The days of the ‘webmaster' sitting in an office offsite to whom organisations send content to be uploaded to their websites are a thing of the past. Today almost all staff members are generating content used in online spaces - organisations are linking to their Facebook, Twitter and Flickr feeds directly from their websites.”

SANGONeT executive director, David Barnard handed the certificates over to the winners.

For more information on the conference go to www.ngopulse.org/conference2009.