Hope for Afghan Children

Hope for Afghan Children is now tweeting using the name afghankids. We’ll use Twitter to update you about this site, about events at the AFCECO orphanages and news from Afghanistan.

We’ll also be using Twitter to follow other organizations providing information about Afghanistan or doing good work for Afghan people, such as Vets for Afghanistan (vets4afstan).

If you’re not familiar with using Twitter or not sure how to make it useful for you, one of the best ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio is to use Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a program which lets you follow different conversation streams on Twitter with ease. Using Tweetdeck, it’s easy, for example, to focus on Afghan issues and tune out other stuff.

To use Tweetdeck:

1. Create a Twitter account if you don’t already have one.
2. Download and install Tweetdeck. It requires Adobe Air to run, which will be installed automatically.
3. Launch Tweetdeck, go through the setup procedure, and then click the Twitter Search icon (the magnifying glass) near the top left.
4. Type a search phrase such as afghan OR afghanistan and press Enter. Or you might try #afghan OR afghankids OR afceco. Note that many people use the #afghan tag to mark tweets that pertain to Afghanistan. Using “OR” in your search phrases expands the scope of your search. So, for example a search for afghankids afceco will find only those tweets that refer to both afghankids and afceco; a search for afghankids OR afceco finds tweets that refer to either afghankids or to afceco or to both.
5. Tweetdeck will display a new column displaying tweets that match your search phrase. Now you can easily track tweets that are relevant.

If you’d prefer to handpick a specific group of twitterers to focus on, use Tweetdeck’s Group search (it’s the icon displaying two people). You’ll see a list of all the people you’re following on Twitter and you can select those you’d like to focus on.

There’s about a month to run in the Gadget Drive we’re running to raise funds for a sound system for Mehan Orphanage. So far, we’ve raised $334…hold the presses! make that $578 (I just checked and saw an updated total)… of the $590 needed to buy the sound system. The administration page for the drive indicates we have another $30 in donations pending, which will take us over our target.

This is a great result, and I think we can do further Gadget Drives once we publicise this site widely and have more people involved.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Gadget Drive is there’s no instant gratification. It takes about 10 days from when you send in your donations until they are processed, a value assigned and the money shows up on the Gadget Drive page. It’s a pity, because having a responsive fundraising thermometer encourages others to contribute. I’ll be giving feedback to Gazelle (the company that runs the Gadget Drives) about this.

We plan to create our own donation widgets, which will let us set up special fundraisers, each with its own “thermometer”. That will give us a lot of fundraising flexibility in the future.

The “official” site launch date has been pushed back a little, due to a technical glitch (well, okay, a human error) that deleted much of the content.

The front page is fully functional, so at least you can donate to our spotlight fundraising cause or sponsor a child. The discussion forums should be back up some time next week, and the rest of the content will follow within a fortnight (that’s two weeks, to those of you not fluent in British Commonwealth English).

Unfortunately, the glitch means that any of you who registered for the forums will probably need to register again. I think you’ll also need to resubscribe to the blog if you did so earlier.

I’ll give you a heads up when things are back in shape.

Rose