What's there for me? What a German think tank can accomplish for an English-speaking readership
At the betterplace lab our mission is to research the contribution digitalization can bring to the improvement of social sector work and more broadly to the quality of life of people all around the world. This is a global task, and not surprisingly we see so many exciting ideas, approaches and experiments coming from all continents. Yet we have also identified the German-speaking world as our main audience.
Why? We have experienced that although many Germans speak good English, there is still a barrier to consume and digest English-speaking websites, presentation and workshops. And we believe it is far more effective to directly address one "market" only, especially if it is such a big and well-established one as the German-speaking aid sector.
At the same time, we believe our research to be quite unique and greatly appreciate a wider audience. Thus while the main bulk of our daily communication, especially on the German blog, is in German, we have explicitly decided to have a bi-lingual site.
So as an English-speaker, what can you get from the betterplace lab?
- All our projects are presented in English and many of the resources we have assembled on the project pages are in English. As one example, check out our Stakeholder Feedback project.
- Many of the German-language presentations consist of screenshots of websites, charts and short text only and are thus accessible even to a non-German audience. If you feel that we have exactly the kind of information you are looking for, drop us a line and we are happy to help you out. That's, for example, what a researcher from Blackbaud did: she was interested in our research about the German donation market and got in touch with Angela Ullrich, our expert on the subject.
- Occasionally we do also blog in English or translate those German posts, which we believe to be especially interesting for an English audience.
In the future, we would love to have a fully English version of our flagship product: the betterplace lab Trendreport. Thus - if you are interested in making the bulk of our research accessible to a much wider audience and have time, talent or funding, please get in touch.
