7amleh builds capacity of 76 NGO workers from 50 organizations on reputation management.

7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media continues to build the capacity of Palestinian NGOs and completed a pilot project to supporot Palestinian NGOs too improve their online reputation. The workshop reached 50 Palestinian NGOs.

Palestinian civil society organizations advoccating for human rights are increasingly finding themselves under attack when their work is critical of Israel. This includes from Israeli authorities who have extensively invested in smearing the reputation of these organizations, including through government supporting NGOs (GONGOs) (see 7amleh’s position paper “Online Smear Campaigns and Deplatforming: The Silencing and Delegitimization of Palestinian Human Rights Defenders, Activists and Organizations“). This training aims to counter these efforts of delegitimization, deplatforming, and at times defunding of Palestinian NGOs.

The training included a set of five workshops on digital security for organizations and how too utilize online techniques to improve their reputations including wikipedia editing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Optimization, design for communications, and outreach and messaging for international media. These workshops were accompanied by one on one sessions on all four topics for five of the participating organizations in order to further support their reputation management and the application of the skills from the workshops in personalized sessions. 

Nasmeh concludes: “The Training was so helpful for me, especially that my background is not that technical, so I learned new things and tips that I will follow and implement in our organisational work and website”.

With the pilot of these trainings now concluded, 7amleh, in cooperation with the trainers and based on the evaluation will improve the curriculum to launch a more extensive training programme at the beginning of next year.