PRESENTING OUR WEB SITE

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Presenting... our Web site:

Without some experience or a bit of guidance, using the Web can be a lot like opening an encyclopedia at random. Interesting but not immediately useful, it can be a confusing place with no apparent beginning, no end, and a great deal of middle.Yet since launching the site in June of 1996 the Trillium Foundation has come to recognize how important a resource our Web page can be. Why we did it... We intended to use our site to take advantage of the Internet as another avenue for interaction with the community, as a means to disseminate information about ourselves and those we fund, and as a way to remain connected to a growing online community. In July, when we launched the site, it contained little more than our mission statement, our program guidelines, and a list of our grantees. Today, after some growing pains, the site has expanded to include information about our staff and how to reach them (by phone or direct e-mail link from the page), the names of our Board members, sections outlining the different Trillium programs or partnerships, and hypertext links to our grantees who are also online. As of this printing visitors will also find new sections that include an online version of this newsletter, an area for locating resources for the not-for-profit sector, an area with information specific to our grantees, and our annual report. Where we're going... In conjunction with our Internet Access project, the Trillium home page strives to take some of the confusion out of the Internet. Through our site we are trying to create a beginning our grantees can use to take their first steps onto the Net - a way to introduce them to their peers and open them up to the vast amount of resources out there for the not-for-profit sector. In this way we hope to help foster a sense of community among those organizations we've helped to develop. For those already online, it's a place where grantees and non-grantees alike can find out more about us, who we've funded, and what they've done. By listing our grantees in the "Previous Grants Awarded" section we stand behind our commitment to remain accountable and transparent in our actions, at the same time helping our grantees to share their accomplishments. As a tool for promoting and informing the public about our special projects and core grants program, the site has become a valuable outlet for posting our core Program Guidelines, and Requests for Proposals, reducing the size of our mailings and helping us to keep costs down. But even more importantly, through the Internet, we are able to reach many more individuals and organizations that we would ordinarily have on a mailing list. Already, in only five months, we have grown to 2,500 visitors a week! Although some of us started out a bit 'techno-phobic', we have developed a keen appreciation of the advantages of being online. Now that we've gotten our feet wet, every day brings new ideas and applications. In the future we are hoping to create more useful connections. For example, in addition to reaching our grantees directly, we hope to have hypertext links which will enable visitors to Trillium's site to access other funders. We'll have an area filled with some of the interesting studies, reports, articles and announcements that come our way. And, hopefully, we'll find a way to create a dynamic interaction with our constituents, sharing observations, trends and emerging issues with each other. Stay tuned. Although some groups seem to be more comfortable than others with the Internet, the fact is, we're all at the very early stages of exploration. Who knows where we'll go!