45 digital counseling sessions for 3 new NGOs “Within the program of increasing the digital efficiency for the second year in a row”

For the second year in a row, the Social Development Forum is implementing a program to increase the digital competency of civil organizations, during which the launch of a new group of digital counseling sessions aimed at developing the digital presence of civil organizations due to the lack or absence of their digital presence in a good way, which negatively affects their access to the largest possible group.

This year, 3 new civil organizations were selected in the Gaza Strip, namely, the Right to Live Association, the General Union of Persons with Disabilities, and the Palestine Future Foundation for Children, we worked with them to increase their digital competence through 45 serial digital counseling sessions that begin by adjusting the general settings of the pages on Social networks, setting up accounts, and ending with preparing periodic plans for digital content on social media platforms.

In the same context, the counseling sessions continued for 7 continuous months with representatives and members of the selected civil organizations, and the sessions varied between direct face-to-face meetings and remote meetings due to the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic that prevailed in the country.

Lima Eliwa, one of the participants from the Palestine Future Foundation for Childhood in the counseling sessions, expressed her experience, saying: “All counseling sessions are very useful, and I am confident that the rest of the sessions will be of more valuable, as I got to know what digital content is and now, I have the ability to write a text with great skill, which in turn is beneficial to the performance and digital activity of the Palestine Future Foundation page.”

The counseling sessions played an important role in restructuring the digital presence on social media platforms and achieving the required interaction, as the sessions included a set of axes such as the basics of publishing on social networks and creating effective digital content through the use of various digital tools.

The sessions were also characterized by a set of practical aspects that enabled the participants to apply what they learned theoretically about the digital world, and these sessions were not limited to guiding the participants towards the use and activation of correct digital technologies, but rather to include follow-up with the participants periodically, answering their questions and providing constructive feedback to them about the content that they produced and the publishing mechanism they used, which reflected positively on improving their skills and abilities.

In this regard, Safaa Al-Haddad, a representative of the Right to Live Association, stressed the importance of her participation in the counseling sessions and the amount of knowledge she obtained, noting that the counseling sessions helped develop the digital performance of her institution on the one hand and her communication skills on the other hand.

She added, “I am able to write posts and tweets better, and my skill in writing news and sharing it on social media has become better, and I am confident that these sessions are what helped the organization develop its digital performance in various aspects.”

It is worth noting that the Social Development Forum provided a set of digital products during the counseling sessions for the participating organizations as a kind of support for their performance and enhancing the diversity of their content, as nearly 56 educational designs were produced talking about disability issues and 6 interactive videos, part of which talks about the nature of the work of each organization and the services it provides that revolves around a core issue of the issues that the organization works on.

According to the counseling sessions coordinator and social networking specialist, Aroob Al-Saqqa, that mentorship sessions had a positive impact on the development of the participants ‘performance. On the level of the organizations’ pages, there has been a progress in their digital performance on social networks, starting with changing the user’s name and standardizing it on different platforms and improving the quality of the cover photo, including “appropriate design, contact information for the organization, user name, logo”, in addition to the way the content is displayed and written, which directly contributed to the increase in the number of followers and the rate of content access. As for the capabilities and skills of the participants, the counseling sessions contributed to building their digital capabilities and increasing their awareness of the importance of using digital tools to facilitate their work.

Al-Saqqa emphasized that counseling sessions are one of the activities through which the Social Development Forum seeks to develop the digital performance of civil organizations a