NCUC Outreach Strategic Plan

NCUC Outreach Strategy for FY18

The NonCommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) is continuing its ongoing efforts for outreach and diversification of its membership. Currently we reached over 504 members from 113 countries. More details and statistics can be found here http://www.ncuc.org/about/members/. While we got more members from developing countries in particular Africa, Asia and Latin America, we are aiming to increase our efforts to inform noncommercial Internet users globally about NCUC involvment with policy making at ICANN. 
We are including CROPP program in our current planning and involving our current members more to make proposals and suggestions for relevant events and conference, targeting new venues and organizations is a very welcome addition to the outreach tools at our disposal. For FY17, we could use 5 slots in quite short time for a new elected executive committee.

The CROPP is complementary to our regular outreach efforts during ICANN meetings, global IGF but also for first time events like CPDP and Rightscon. Our strategy is combining the different resources and also try to coordinate with the help of our existing members. We experimented for FY17 to let more members doing outreach with support from the executive committee and chair. We also organized some outreach events outside ICANN meetings. For FY17, we would like to continue the ongoing work, improve with the feedback and inputs got from previous events , and coordinate more with GSE staff, in particular for some regions.

The 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 and making civil society more visible

The IANA transition raised some interest from several civil society organizations and we got some of them to be involved with us. However, we are trying to get more involved on GNSO PDPs since we have this 3 long-term and heavier processes that will have a big influence. We are also continuing our work to present the ongoing discussion on ICANN accountability and the positions advocated by NCUC that may appeal to CSO, such as the Human Rights discussions.
We are trying to attend more events not just to have a one session to talk about NCUC and ICANN but also to use that as opportunity for deep 1 to 1 discussion with prospective members and current ones as in-reach and engagement effort. Getting new members is important, letting them more engaged and actively involved much more.
Therefore we are expanding our outreach to our venues beyond those we are used to.

Building national/regional engagement

For FY17, we gave more priorities for CROPP proposals coming from Africa, Latin America and AsiaPac. We attended for first time the African Internet Summit to strengthen our presence there and counted on highly visible organization like APC and others to do it, using their experience and knowledge of the community.
We will keep this approach and explore with members and GSE staff about possible venues to attend, including regional IGFs, internet related conferences but also events like OECD ministerial in Mexico. We are planning to submit workshops proposals, requests for session/meeting rooms and so for those events to optimize our presence there.

Building internal capacity

To continue our inreach efforts, we are empowering our members more by encouraging them to attend conferences, applying for CROPP, guiding them to other sources of funding. The executive committee is playing its role for supporting the members and helping them when they volunteer.
NCUC events in ICANN meetings are playing the double role of inreach/outreach since mostly our active members and not officers make the presentations about main topics and positions advocated by NCUC in ongoing policies processes.