The last week I have been busy, collecting my thoughts, collecting data, collecting inspiration and preparing to move. Thus no posts, because I was too busy being inside myself, thinking.

Which brought me to today’s revelation, why I do this work. Simple, I’m excited most about small non-profit organizations, their goals, objectives and ideas and being there for them to combine media, art and information to move people to act.

This is what I have been gathering all this information for, to help these advocates of social empowerment with the same tools as corporate and businesses, to attain results to improve their reach.

To be honest, this is what I was studying in Holland for, Cultureel Maatschappelijke Vorming, CMV for short, which combines Art, Education, Recreation and Culture to address issues in Society. A form of indirect social work, because you are the orchestrator of events, activities and information aimed at helping the people solve the social problems, become aware and work together. You are an ambassador for the people and connect the involved groups to come to collaboration.

As such, a website can accomplish a great part in giving non-profits the tools to inform, attract, engage and educate the society. From creating visibility online via social media, starting conversations about the topics and calling out to people to join the cause, volunteer and donate easily via your website.

A website can go to great lengths in reaching people and moving them by having great levels of involvement. For example, I was once checking a site in Holland aimed at getting the neighborhood active in taking care of the street, helping each other and create a feeling of unity. The activity was quite fun and simple, make a video of something in your street that needs fixing, the winner receives a certain amount for their street to pay for the repairs or changes and to have a party with all those living in the street.

It was fun to see how people became active in voicing their problems and then going on to asking their neighbors what they thought, simply by doing that they sparked the idea of a civil society. Simply by doing this a street get’s cleaned up, along with the social workers and the people that live in the street.

On Aruba we are far from getting to the concept of Civil Society, which basically means, every citizen is primarily responsible to address issues that are important ecologically, socially and otherwise. If a school in a neighborhood, serving the direct neighborhood is disheveled due to lack of funds or maintenance, the people in the area have the responsibility to make a note of this, reach out to help and set up for it to be addressed. Funding, which is often seen as a problem, can be addressed in many different ways, and most people never think of them, when it comes to things they expect a government to “fix”.

But imagine if your NGO website reached people to be more aware and not throw gum on the floor, and dump their trash correctly or appreciate the local waters and natural resources and handle carefully when they decide to build, or run businesses? Would you not have won half the battle?

That is what we, Creative Design Development, stand for, first and foremost, to be of assistance to these NGO’s, foundations, non-profits and small micro-businesses to reach their ultimate goals and help in our society in which ever way we can.

We thus have adjusted our pricing as of 1 of September 2010 for all corporate or business clients, but not for any of the non-profit clients and those to come in the future. We also have adjusted hourly rates for these organizations, where they can benefit of the same service and expertise at a price that fits a non-profit’s budget and needs.

We also donate domain names and new hosting accounts to very small organizations who have never been online, that means the first year the hosting is on us, to help you!

To be eligible you must be an organization operating in and for Aruban Causes, whether ecological, social and educational. This includes schools!

For more information about web development and design for non-profits email us at cau...@creativedesigndevelopment.com or call 297 743 9816.

This was rather unexpected and shocking at best, I really panicked once I saw it, but the website was down all weekend. Seemingly adjusting DNS info in the CNAME to work with Google apps was a huge flop.

Way to go doing it the lazy way!

The Domain name registrar management is not as straight forward as most when it comes to A, CNAME and other record changes or additions and this cost me a fair amount of airtime. Happily, once identified and changed the problem was resolved in a few hours. Just before I stepped out for a nice day at the beach on Sunday!

What have you guys been up to lately?