In May 2018, Malaysia saw a new beginning : a new political coalition party, Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), took over Malaysia for the first time since independence from the British in 1957. Overnight, the political tsunami in Malaysia became a hallmark of democracy across the country and the region.
As with any new situation, democracy can continue to flourish, and influence the region, or, it can start to take another shape, and slowly decline, and fade away. In recognizing the possibility of Malaysia’s revert to dictatorship and draconian laws, USAID launched Malaysia Reform Initiative (MARI) project to support and promote civil society organisations that are pushing for political and democratic reforms.
TechSoup was called in to design and conduct a pilot training for organisations working across political and democratic reforms. Working with Kitabisa, TechSoup led the design of a series of training modules for the participants, split into basic and intermediate knowledge levels.
The training modules were designed to help NGOs and organisations understand their target audiences, design more effective messaging, relevant content including the use of GIFs, memes and videos, as well as understanding basic social media insights in order to design campaigns that resonated with their intended audiences.
To help the NGOs identify and prioritise their needs, TechSoup facilitated a Mapping Your Action Plan session, where NGOs were grouped according to focus areas and sectors.
Each group listed their organisational challenges, ranked the priority of each challenge, according to the level of urgency. Finally, they mapped the challenge to the level of technology required.
The combined result is shown below:
To increase exposure to industry practitioners, TechSoup also curated an Open Marketplace, where industry-level experts in various fields came to share their knowledge, tips and techniques. This included experts from data analytics, digital content in advocacy, Google suite, grants and fundraising, and photography. TechSoup’s partner Yayasan Salam was also on-site to provide much-needed support and understanding of TechSoup Malaysia’s updated eligibility criteria.
By empowering the NGOs through this training, the end goal is for them to be more confident in using these tools independently, and ultimately, for them to create the social change that Malaysia needs.
