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Advocacy through Information Dissemination: North Carolina Welfare Resource Exchange (NPT Innovation
An example of a nonprofit distributing timely, critical information on resources and promising practices in an easily accessible format through its website and monthly e-mail newsletter, thereby encouraging greater collaboration and increased effective communication and service delivery among other organizations, advocates, and stakeholders. [This is one of six nonprofit examples recognized by OMB Watch's Nonprofits' Policy and Technology (NPT) Project for effective use of technology in their public policy activities through the 1999 Nonprofit Technology Innovation Awards.]
Introduction
The North Carolina Welfare Resource Exchange is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, Internet-based information clearinghouse that focuses on welfare reform issues in the hope of ultimately improving outcomes for children, youth, and families who live in poverty in North Carolina. With welfare reform, everyone must take new, larger roles in helping poor families move from welfare to self-sufficiency. To lend a hand, WRE-North Carolina’s one-stop resource for advocates, nonprofits, faith communities, government officials, business leaders, and welfare recipients-offers up-to-date information on new laws, policy changes, upcoming conferences, research, and promising practices in welfare reform.
Through its Web site, monthly e-mail newsletter, and annual promising practices conference, the Welfare Resource Exchange makes widely available credible, reliable, and practical information on welfare resources and practices to promote informed decision making, effective programs, and increased public awareness, collaboration, and civic engagement.
Background
The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 created a new urgency to institute meaningful, effective welfare reform in North Carolina. The Federal Government not only passed the power of developing and implementing welfare plans to the individual states but also established new lifetime benefit limits for welfare recipients.
In the fall of 1997, a group of diverse North Carolina individuals and organizations, concerned that recent welfare policy changes were not widely understood, collaborated to form WRE—an Internet-based information clearinghouse that focuses on welfare reform issues. Now, WRE boasts a state-of-the-art web site which coordinates efforts to enhance the public’s understanding of welfare reform and its implications to avoid duplication of scarce resources.
WRE aims to make widely available credible, reliable, and practical information on welfare resources and practices in order to promote informed decision making, effective programs and an increased level of public awareness, collaboration, and civic engagement. With an eye to improving outcomes for the State’s children and their families through welfare reform, WRE’s services are especially useful to those working with or on the behalf of children, youth, and families living in poverty in North Carolina.
But, everyone touched by welfare reform is invited and encouraged to access WRE’s services. Concentrating on welfare reform resources and practices, www.ncwre.org links to current information, new techniques, coming events, related policy and legislation, and on-line discussion. WRE also publishes a monthly electronic newsletter, the WREsources Update, which highlights the latest welfare reform resources, and co-hosts an annual conference on promising practices in welfare reform in North Carolina.
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Welfare Resource Exchange Project Budget FY1999/2000
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Level of Innovation
While WRE is the first group in North Carolina to focus such diverse interests in the non-profit, business, educational, and faith communities to enhance the public’s understanding of welfare reform and its implications, it is also the first such group to center its activities on Internet technology. This is an innovative strategy for a number of reasons.
First, by using the Internet, WRE is able to distribute up-to-the-minute information on pertinent information such as Federal grant deadlines and the latest TANF changes to its constituency and is able to expand its constituency very quickly. Secondly, the Internet helps WRE keep its overhead costs down. For instance, WRE is able to operate with only one full-time paid employee and one (very) part-time technical consultant. And WRE is able to get the word out using only a modicum of environmental resources—we only rarely do mass mailings, for example.
Measures of Success
All of WRE’s efforts have been very successful thus far. Since www.ncwre.org went on-line in March of 1998, we have had more than 36,000 hits. That averages out to about 99 hits per day. The WREsources Update has a mailing list of more than 170 subscribers and we are receiving subscription requests weekly. In addition, the participants in the Recipes for Success: Promising Practices in Welfare Reform rose from about 200 the first year to close to 400 the second. Our success can also be measured by looking at the major milestones the project has reached.
In addition to establishing an organizational administration, operating procedures, and project goals, in a little more than one year WRE has:
- Launched its Web page which includes an “About WRE” section, a resource section, a policy section with links to NC legislative updates, new policy, etc., a calendar section, conference notes, and a discussion page;
- Launched the WREsources Update, established a regular release schedule, and linked each issue to the Web page;
- Attended and/or made presentations at 41 conferences or meetings;
- Conducted survey research regarding potential use of the Web site and received a 38% response rate;
- Developed a reputation as resource/referral source and responded to about 20 individual requests for information;
- Secured funding from three separate sources; and
- Defined categories for a searchable database.
Next Steps
With these important lessons in mind, WRE’s future goals include:
- creating a searchable on-line database to share both resources and practices by subject area;
- developing an on-line searchable, annotated bibliography of published welfare resources (books, journal articles);
- conducting outreach (both on-line and by traditional methods) to build relationships and encourage greater use of the Web page;
- producing “hard” publications for constituents that do not have immediate access to the Internet or e-mail while encouraging/helping these constituents to gain Internet access and develop skills with technology.
Lessons Learned
While WRE has seen much success in its efforts, we have learned some lessons.
First, establishing a collaborative organization that represents a variety of viewpoints is quite a challenge. For such an organization to succeed, it takes time to establish trust among the different groups and sort out “turf” issues. For instance, it took more than six months to hammer out an agreement about governance structure and operating procedures.
Second, although the Internet provides an immediate vehicle for information distribution an effective Web site takes careful planning and design. We continue to change and enhance the site to improve its usability. We have also learned the important lesson that not every person who might use or benefit from our technology-based services has access to them or knowledge of how to access/use them.