NCUC Outreach Strategic Plan

 NCUC Outreach Strategy for FY 16 

The NonCommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) has long taken seriously the need for outreach and diversification of its membership.  Our efforts have borne fruit: On January 15, 2013, we had 204 members from 62 countries, including 86 noncommercial organizations and 118 individuals.  By September 30, 2015, we had grown to 439 members from 104 countries, including 109 noncommercial organizations and 330 individuals—more than doubled in three years. Moreover, as is indicated at http://www.ncuc.org/about/members/ we have developed a rather good regional balance—AF 76, AP 87, EUR 107, LAC 47, NA 102, unknown 20—with roughly half our members being in the NA/EUR regions and half in the AF/AP/LAC regions.

The CROPP program is a very welcome addition to the outreach tools at our disposal.  While we did not take advantage of the program in its first year, in FY 15 we employed all five available travel slots.  This allowed us to not only raise the profile of NCUC and attract some new membership applications, but also to broaden understanding of ICANN and its multistakeholder model among civil society and other actors who sometimes had, let us say, variable views about the organization and community.  As such, a reasonably small investment of resources was leveraged to yield reasonably large effects.

NCUC wishes to build on this success in FY 16.  Our strategy is built around the following core objectives, which will guide us in targeting opportunities for NCUC members to attend regional events with CROPP assistance:

Expanding knowledge of ICANN 

ICANN issues have been gaining notice not only in established venues like the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and its regional progeny, but also in broader, non-traditional venues.   The IANA transition, the efforts to construct post-transition accountability mechanisms, and GNSO/ICANN developments relevant to privacy, freedom of expression, and human rights more generally have attracted the interest of a wide range of civil society actors around the world that had previously opted not to engage in ICANN.  As such, in the past year we have added to our membership notable organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation in the USA, and the Centre for Communication Governance and the Observer Research Foundation in India.  Our plan is to continue to reach out to Internet-oriented individuals and organizations that heretofore did not see ICANN as central enough to their respective agendas to invest the requisite time and personpower.  We believe that by communicating the goals and objectives of both ICANN and NCUC to new audiences we will gain a new wave of membership which will enhance the ICANN community.  Attendance at regional meetings on Internet freedom, cybersecurity, human rights and related topics represent excellent targets of opportunity.

Building national/regional engagement

NCUC is one of the more diverse communities within ICANN with members now in 104 countries. We will continue to encourage membership applications from traditionally underrepresented regions, particularly by actors that show a clear potential to actively engage their respective national/regional communities in the work of NCUC and ICANN.  Attendance at national/regional IGF events will be particularly helpful in this regard; in FYI we prioritized the European Dialogue on Internet Governance to good effect, and hope to replicate and expand on this in FY 16.  

Building internal capacity

Engaging our current membership and building our internal capabilities is a core concern in the NCUC. To strengthen our “in-reach” and engagement, we have created a Membership Affairs Team that conducted an extensive poll of the members to identify barriers to deeper participation, particularly among members from developing countries, as well as possible solutions. In parallel, we hope to encourage diverse members to apply to attend events in our core focus areas such as privacy, human rights, security, access to knowledge and Internet governance for development. By building this internal capability we hope to drive greater engagement from our members on a broad range of topics and to strengthen our engagement in the policy development process.

By focusing on these objectives we hope to ensure that the funding made available by the CROPP program will be utilized in a manner which yields measurable increases in NCUC’s membership and capacity to contribute to the work of the GNSO and ICANN more generally.