Diane Burns , Adobe Blog
here are almost 3 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey, creating one of the most heart-wrenching humanitarian crises in the Middle East. Local organizations like Eğitim Reformu Girişimi (Education Reform Initiative, or ERG), established in 2003, are effecting real change by improving primary education for Syrian refugees.
ERG is a non-profit that provides research, training, and advocacy to improve education for children in Turkey, and their ability to share their unique insights with teachers, policymakers, and the community is crucial to their mission. This year, ERG needed to publish a study to illuminate the educational challenges school-age Syrian refugees in Turkey are facing and outline the subsequent policy recommendations.
In creating this report, ERG faced a three-pronged challenge: present lots of data, detail policy recommendations, and keep their audience engaged. They were challenged to find the most effective way to convey this heft of information in an easily consumable way, but the success of their mission depended on it.
Solving for those three challenges led ERG to use InDesign’s Publish Online feature. They ultimately created an interactive online booklet called “Community Building Through Inclusive Education” in partnership with their Istanbul-based design firm, Myra. The report, published in Turkish and English, outlined the scope and complexity of the challenges that refugees and their host communities face, and provided deep insights on policy recommendations to improve the educational prospects of school-age Syrian children.
Publish Online enabled ERG to powerfully convey their story through interactive charts, timelines, maps, and multimedia content. It solved the challenge of conveying lots of data in an engaging and memorable way.
But ERG then faced another obstacle: finding a scalable and cost-effective way to widely distribute their reports. Publish Online was also up for that challenge. Publish Online created a shareable, public URL for their booklet that allowed ERG to publish the link for their new content in e-bulletins, email blasts, social media, and, of course, on ERG’s website. With a few simple steps, audiences everywhere had single-click access to the report from their mobile or desktop browser.
“We decided to use Publish Online because it is easy for our readers to reach; it’s interactive, and very user-friendly,” said ERG Head of Communications Özge Karakaya of her decision to use Publish Online. “It helped us present our data visually and in a more holistic and interesting way, supplemented by infographics, animations, photos and videos. Moreover, it enabled us to track the interest in our publications and analyze our impact.”
Ms. Karakaya estimates that publishing this report online helped ERG double the reach of their typical reports printed and distributed via PDF. At the same time their audience grew, their costs were cut in half.
The report also created a tangible and unanticipated engagement factor: ERG got numerous requests to organize events around subjects mentioned in the report as well as invitations to a number of important partnerships from other organizations engaged in education issues. Publish Online helped increase the general interest in ERG’s activities and brought it more visibility.
Publish Online provides a perfect publishing solution for groups and organizations around the world struggling to present complex information. To see other examples of how Publish Online is being used, check out this gallery of Publish Online projects. You can learn more about how to use Publish Online by viewing the tutorial at Lynda.com, “InDesign: Publish Online,” or visiting the Adobe Help pages.
ERG’s Community Building Through Inclusive Education Online Booklet:
https://bit.ly/ERGCommunity
Learn more about the Eğitim Reformu Girişimi (Education Reform Initiative):
http://en.egitimreformugirisimi.org
