On Friday morning, I dragged myself out of bed to attend Mary Floberg, Arwa Jamil, Valentin Stoyanov, and Michael Yuen’s Honors Thesis defense at ASU. Their Honors Thesis Go NGO – The Development of a Non-Profit Organization was quite insightful and I really like what the group is trying to accomplish.

Go Non-Governmental Organizations, or Go NGO, was started in 2004 by Jon Beekman, an ASU alumnus and Fullbright Scholar. After spending time in Mexico and being heavily involved with the nonprofit sector there, he realized that many nonprofit organizations used the internet, yet only a select few utilized it as a mass communication and marketing tool. Go NGO has since served as a thesis project for business students at ASU, and its vision is to help bridge the gap between non-profit organizations in developing countries and the underserved individuals they intend to help.

Go NGO’s has currently focusing their “beta” efforts on Mexico due to its close vicinity to the US, and the increasing need for non-profits in Mexico to establish a web presence in an ever increasing online population. Future plans are to expand their nonprofit solutions to other developing countries in need of help.

Thankfully, the organization has made some good progress. A recent trip to Mexico has helped gain interest in the organization and helped to collect concerns and considerations from potential users. In addition, close work with ASU’s CSE department has led to the possibility of Engineering students contributing to the organization through a Capstone Project.

So how can you help?

A big obstacle at the moment is figuring out a way to host clients’ websites. Commercial solutions are too expensive and don’t carry any specific benefit to the community, and in-house hosting through ASU’s IT servers has been met with resistance due to legal and security issues.

Also, if ASU does include Go NGO as part of the Capstone Project, then the development of an open source, multilingual, platform independent, web based content management system will be the focus of the project. In the meantime, assistance in the search and development of a compatible content management system would be ideal.

So this is where the Closet Entrepreneur has vowed to help out (for those that don’t know – I’m an ASU grad, my mother is from Mexico, and I have very close ties to Arwa Jamil). First and foremost, I’m hoping to try and help spread the word about Go NGO in the hope of finding web designers and developers who would be interested in working with Go NGO to develop solutions for their content management system and provide useful resources such as keyword search optimization, advertising techniques, and content layout techniques. Second, I’m hoping to start an NGO adoption agency where companies donate and allocate unused web space to help host NGO’s in need.

So, if you can help out in any way, please do not hesitate to contact Go NGO at info@gongo.org, or you can contact me and I will relay the info to Arwa Jamil and the gang.

Sincerely,
The Closet Entrepreneur

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