Designing Strategies for setting up a new blog
Define your audience
Is your audience local, national, continental or regional, international? Because of the technology involved, your audience should be all four. However you need to think about prioritising the four (local, national, continental or regional, international) depending on your organisations mission statement, aims and objections. You may wish to define a primary and secondary audience.
Define your message
Be clear on what you want your blog to do. Is it to campaign for a specific change on an issue? Is it to inform on the work of your organisation? Is it to document for example document human rights abuses? Is it for all three?
Decide on your criteria for your blog
Primary criteria. Specific short and long term goals
Secondary criteria. Do you want more publicity? A higher profile?
Identify your allies
Identify those organisations and groups who are able and willing to support you and with whom you can work and link to them through your blog roll.
Choose your Language
Choosing which language you wish to use on your blog is
an important decision. It is important for us all to consider using our own indigenous languages when communicating with others. However this has to be weighed against using "colonial" languages such as English or French which have the advantage of reaching a much wider audience. In an ideal world bloggers could translate their blogs into a number of
languages such as Zulu and English but this creates more work and requires a higher level of technical skill and additional software.
