It is not enough to develop information - for example on a wiki, or on a blog. The information must be made available in order to be useful.
And you need to choose which methods to use depending your budget and how many persons you wish to reach with the effort. There is also several other difficult choices on what type of persons you wish to reach.
Information can be shared in a number of cheap ways, for example:
- Traditional methods such as talking with friends, coworkers, face-to-face courses and textbooks.
- Next time you phone a relative that lives far away or abroad, mention Appropedia and talk about what it is about.
- Make a bright and colourful leaflet or poster that have got a logotype and a webadress and put it at bulletinboards at your work, or school, or at your public library. (please ask for permission first, and tell them what it is promoting)
- Email a press release with interesting information to your local media, radio, TV, newspapers and magazines. Send a small kit with a well written concise text and full contact information (webpage adress, email address and telephone number to a person that are qualified to answer any type of questions), and attach a few digital photos or images that represent the cause in a proper way. If it is done professionally and you have something new and interesting to share, you could get into the news or even a talkshow on TV or radio for free. (see below on advertising in Television and radio)
- Make a blog or "Podcast" and post it online, and recommend your friends to read it.
- Mobile phones, for example through Akvo's tools to enable end users of water technology to provide feedback via mobile phone.
- Various forms of offline distribution of content which is developed or sourced online. See Offline content collaboration.
Expensive ways:
- Billboards (on buildings and by the road side). It is very difficult to make the design stand out and being appealing enough to make it seen by many people. It may require many billboards in same area or being continuos or coming back regularly over a long time period.
- Television and radio. It is very expensive to produce the advertising and to buy the time slots in bigger media. There is possibilities to reach many people, but the downside is that there are so many different stations that people use, and many viewers/listeners are probably changing the station or doing something else when ad-breaks begin.
