DemTools

Last month, NDI trained political parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on the use of CiviParty, NDI’s contact management DemTool, which is based on the open source contact relationship management (CRM) system, CiviCRM. READ MORE »

The vision behind DemTools is to build the capacity of groups to organize more effectively, reach target audiences, and more easily gather and analyze data with simple-to-use web applications. Since launching the toolkit in August 2014, that vision has come to fruition. NDI offices and partner organizations are now using DemTools to engage in technology-empowered programs that would have otherwise been impossible due to cost or staffing limitations. With renewed funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to further the development and expansion of DemTools, our team has been pursuing a renewed vision for DemTools: one that emphasizes better user support, enhanced multilingual capacity and improved usability. We developed roadmaps for our CiviParty and CiviMP, Issues, and Elections Demtools, which chart our way forward. READ MORE »

Since 2000, NDI has worked with a broad range of political parties in Colombia to develop effective communication strategies that leverage new technologies to improve congressional-constituent relations. The recent launch of the Ciudadanía y Congresistas (aka Citizen and Legislators) platform is the latest example of such a project, which leveraged our Issues DemTool to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their members of congress.

As a refresher, the Issues DemTool is one of four, open source, online platforms that makes up the Democracy Toolkit, a suite of tools launched by our team last August to address the most common challenges faced by NDI partners: organizing contacts, connecting government with constituents, managing election data, and fostering civic debate. Each DemTool was designed to be easy-to-use and inexpensively deployed to support civic activists, political party officials, election observers, candidates for elected office, and members of parliament worldwide. READ MORE »