NetSquared teaming up with Sun Microsystems to produce global Hack Days. Sao Paolo, Brazil was a success on October 1, stay tuned for an update. Next up, China!
NetSquared is an initiative ofTechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
- Home
- Stop Family Violence
Stop Family Violence
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Stop Family Violence will use Web 2.0 technologies to empower local programs, enhance information sharing, help people find the services they need, promote local leadership, and coordinate activism that will keep women and children safe.
Supporting organization:
Stop Family Violence
URL:
http://www.stopfamilyviolence.org
City:
New York
State/Region:
New York
Country:
USA
Give and Take: Describe your project's top three needs
Type of expertise needed:
Technical Expertise NEAR TERM: help us determine open source options vs. custom build. ONGOING: advice on state of the art server, website and user security features since our members are at high risk of cyberstalking.
Type of expertise needed:
Marketing/Media Expertise NEAR TERM: Develop collateral materials to market our new website. In-kind gifts for printing, mailing. ONGOING: Identify strategies to increase site visibility. Corporate sponsors for advertising to help drive traffic to our site.
Type of expertise needed:
Other
~ Program evaluation to assess social change
~ Mobilizing from online to community activism
~ Building engaged online community
~ Message development and dealing with backlash
~ Financial support, planning
~ Board members
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Every year, millions of people are severely abused in the United States.
Stop Family Violence (SFV) is the leading national grassroots activist organization working to organize and amplify their voices and the voices of their allies to bring them to bear on the social and political agendas affecting their lives.
Since its beginning, the strength of the violence against women movement has come from diverse people joining together, realizing their shared struggles and collective power and then raising their voices to effect social change. Research has shown that the incidence of family violence declines when the community is made aware of the problem; when residents can find services; when there is a network of leaders within the community and when services and institutions are held accountable to community needs.
Stop Family Violence looks to utilize the many new technologies of the Web 2.0 revolution to empower local programs, enhance information sharing, help people find the services they need, promote local leadership and coordinate online and offline activism that will hold institutions accountable and keep women and children safe. 
The new SFV website will create an integrated, collaborative, service, information and action network between local, state and national programs, community activist groups, survivors and their allies. We will develop innovative community blog tools to allow our members to publish their own action alerts, build petitions and send email through our site to specified targets. Other members of the SFV community will be able to recommend (rate) the action, add comments and participate.
In addition, the SFV site will serve as an information aggregator. Members will be able to upload information that will be archived and published on the SFV site, as well as syndicated to other member sites using XML feeds.
SFV will provide tools for local programs to build their own affordable, well designed, easily maintained web site, where they can publish announcements, reports, newsletters, press releases, etc. and feed that information to the main SFV gateway. They’ll be able to grow a mailing list, recruit volunteers, accept donations, create surveys, organize events, as well as receive news and action alert feeds to keep their content fresh.
Local activist groups will be able to use social networking tools to build a home page, publicize the work they are doing, coordinate events and gain members. And victims will be able to use program locator tools to find the resources they need, and will be able to find others with similar struggles for support and advocacy.
In sum, SFV envisions building a vital online activist community that empowers people to get help, get informed, and get involved in the ongoing efforts to stop family violence.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Stop Family Violence will charge an annual fee for service to organizations participating in our network.
Target market: There are approximately 2000 local domestic violence (DV) programs and 1500 local sexual assault (SA) programs nationwide; approximately 20% have no websites, an additional 30% have rudimentary ones. There are also unknown numbers of child abuse, child sexual abuse, elder abuse, and anti-trafficking organizations.
Marketing strategy: Stop Family Violence is already known to many local DV and SA programs, and we have strong working relations with the state coalitions to which they belong as well.
We will use a variety of outreach strategies – email, direct mail, phone solicitation, conference exhibits and presentations, advertising in trade publications, and of course viral marketing strategies via the website. We will direct our efforts first to the DV/SA program area; expand to other abuse issue areas once sustainability is achieved.
The above estimates are conservative; we are optimistic that a majority of local organizations will participate in our network within 3 years. Revenues generated above sustainability level will be used to support the ongoing work of Stop Family Violence. Twenty percent of profits will be placed in reserve for Web 3.0 redesign :)
Potential obstacles:
Sadly, one of the biggest challenges we’ll face in building a vital online community to end family violence is making sure the community is both safe and secure
Recent events in the blogosphere have shown the frightening degree of hostility and misogyny that women face online. It is crucially important, for the safety of our site visitors, who come to our site seeking refuge from abuse - that community posts be tightly monitored.
We are also very concerned about the security of our members and their data. Stalking and cyberstalking are very real threats to the population we serve. As a result, we will collect as little personal information as possible, all submissions to our site will use secure socket technology, and all data will be stored in encrypted fashion in a secure server location.
Organizationally, the biggest challenges in initiating this project are time and money :) It will stretch our current staff resources to oversee development and marketing of this new project while maintaining our current activities. The anticipated development costs stretch our current financial resources as well, as will hiring a dedicated staff position to oversee the project before it becomes sustainable.
Resource Needs:
We have identified a strong technical team, Gorges Web Sites, with whom we will contract for the work and for ongoing services.
As indicated above, the project will place heavy demands on our budget and current staffing. Below is a budget summary that includes staff, funding and marketing needs up through our estimated sustainability point of 2 years. We will explore the use of open source software once technical specifications have been identified, with the hopes of reducing costs. In addiion, we would welcome the resources of dedicated, skilled volunteers to assist with marketing and promotion, and in-kind gifts to assist in development of print materials and mailing expenses, to help defray projected expenses.
Detailed budget available upon request.
Key Milestones:
Technology Partner: Gorges Web Sites
Technologies Used:
Project Summary:
Every year, millions of people are severely abused in the United States.
Stop Family Violence (SFV) is the leading national grassroots activist organization working to organize and amplify their voices and the voices of their allies to bring them to bear on the social and political agendas affecting their lives.
Since its beginning, the strength of the violence against women movement has come from diverse people joining together, realizing their shared struggles and collective power and then raising their voices to effect social change. Research has shown that the incidence of family violence declines when the community is made aware of the problem; when residents can find services; when there is a network of leaders within the community and when services and institutions are held accountable to community needs.
Stop Family Violence looks to utilize the many new technologies of the Web 2.0 revolution to empower local programs, enhance information sharing, help people find the services they need, promote local leadership and coordinate online and offline activism that will hold institutions accountable and keep women and children safe.
The new SFV website will create an integrated, collaborative, service, information and action network between local, state and national programs, community activist groups, survivors and their allies. We will develop innovative community blog tools to allow our members to publish their own action alerts, build petitions and send email through our site to specified targets. Other members of the SFV community will be able to recommend (rate) the action, add comments and participate.
Comments
TABLE - Sustainability
StopFamilyViolence.org the people's voice for family peace.
TABLE - Resources Needed
StopFamilyViolence.org the people's voice for family peace.
TABLE - MIlestones
StopFamilyViolence.org the people's voice for family peace.
ignore this
ignore this