We have now switched to a more robust website tool, NationBuilder, thanks to Saul, our website developer. However, the tool is only as good as how it is used. Fortunately, Sharon joined the C-Team as our Content Manager just as the new website went live and the content has expanded rapidly along with the growing interest in Basic Income.
We now have 533 people listed in our NationBuilder database. Short of our target of 1,000 but a respectable number! We had a surge of new members as a result of the Case for Basic Income for the Arts campaign led by Craig Berggold and his team.
Some other website statistics include:
68 news articles in the News blog - we regularly post Basic Income news and articles from Ontario, across Canada and around the world.
4 Cases for BI campaigns hosted on our website and shared with Coalition Canada - Women, Work, Small Businesses, the Arts - visit the Cases for BI area of the website to see the significant work being done by the OBIN C-Team and their collaborators and partners from across Canada
The main areas of the website focus on: breaking news in the Basic Income world which gets posted to the News blog and an information centre that encompasses most of the website. The information is organized by topic, the Case for Basic Income series, the BI Community Chat videos, BI and Poverty, BI and Faith Communities are just some examples. Recently we ran a publicity campaign for Basic Income Week and Basic Income Day.
Upcoming, we will be promoting Lobby Week on Parliament Hill as a virtual event. The website also acts as an archive for BI information of all kinds and for the activities that OBIN as a group has participated in and promoted.
The C-Team operates as transparently as possible. To that end we post our monthly C-team minutes, our annual financial statements and the monthly newsletter on the website to keep OBIN members informed.
We hope our website will be used as a research tool by a wide variety of individuals who are advocating for Basic Income. We are in the process of adding a Search function to make research easier to perform. Various policies, reports and articles are available for download. A recent addition to the site is the Basic Income Posters page which is available to individuals to download BI posters and logos for distribution in their neighbourhoods and to their networks of families, friends, social media, etc. The posters are able to be customized to promote your own BI group. Grassroots advocacy is critical in getting the BI message out to Canadian communities.
One of our ongoing challenges is publicizing our information-rich website so people know of its existence and then once they discover it, how to keep them coming back to explore, educate themselves and share with others. We therefore seek your assistance in bringing interesting articles to our attention, using the website as a source for advocating Basic Income within your communities and promoting it whenever and wherever possible.
And finally, as many of you know, OBIN now has a highly active Facebook presence thanks to Adam and Tiffany.
Report by Sharon Zoschke and Joe Foster
September 2020