WordPress provides an excellent platform for non-profit organizations to build out their web presence. In this joint session, two unique non-profit projects will be showcased, and questions about both projects and/or why using WordPress is such a benefit to non-profits will be answered by both presenters.
CURE International
Learn how CURE International moved to WordPress to become an award-winning website as well as providing their constituents with the world’s first social sponsorship platform (cure.org/curekids). This talk will also cover the release of Personal Fundraiser, an open source (GPL) WordPress plugin that provides organizations the ability to allow their fans and constituents to create their own custom online fundraisers using Paypal donations and other payment methods.
UNICEF in Uganda
We built a very graphically oriented custom theme for UNICEF in Uganda. The product is a information portal that includes resources about health, education, workers rights, and more. We get our content from the Uganda Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and other in-country partners. The portals are deployed in rural community centers. These centers have spotty internet at best. We wanted to keep all the systems sync’ed, so we devised a process that includes:
- a centralized WordPress “master” install, where content creators & administrators add new resources
- a custom script that packages the “master” install into a distributable format — on CD-ROM or USB Stick.
- a custom script that installs (and updates) WordPress onto the community center machines.
This script installs a full system to support WordPress (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and the system runs locally on the machines. The community center machines are updated periodically, when new content becomes available on the master machine and someone is available to drive to the rural off-the-grid areas, or automatically for those machines that have infrequent internet access. We think this is a really unique way of using WordPress, and it creates a lot of social good. We’re pretty happy with the results — it’s a really cool looking application, with some amazing materials.
Check out Zach’s slides: Using WordPress to Power Nonprofits
Check out John’s slides: WordPress for the Greater Good
About the Speakers:
John Kleinschmidt is the technology dude for CURE International where he pushes cure.org to its limits. When he is not building new features for CURE, John keeps busy mountain biking, playing hockey and loving his 3 kids and wife.
Zach is a SF based geek and entrepreneur who has spent the last 10 years building and working with startups and non-profits around the world. Zach migrated from Movable Type to WordPress in 2004 and never looked back.