New Tactics in Human Rights helps human rights defenders work more effectively so they can achieve their goals and better address human rights violations around the world. We do this by:

1. Creating and sharing information and materials: New Tactics developed a range of online materials for human rights defenders to use in their work.
2. Training and mentoring: Training and mentoring for human rights advocates supports them in their work. In the early years, the training focused on creating a forum and tools for the sharing and exchange of tactics. Since 2005, the training has focused on the tools and methodology to create strategy and then connect the strategy with tactics that help organizations be more effective in advancing human rights.
3. Building an online community: Monthly peer-to-peer online conversations have enabled the strengthening of a global community of human rights advocates.

The new website is designed to strengthen all three of these core areas of work.

Creating and sharing information and materials

We have re-organized and re-connected our materials in order to make it easier for human rights defenders to find new ways to acheive their goals. There are multiple ways for defenders to find what they are looking for: we now have a Resource Library that is a collection of our case studies, tools and our book. The only resources that are not currently found in the Resource Library include: short tactic summaries and conversation summaries. Defenders can find tactics under Explore Tactics and our conversation summaries are found under Join the Conversation.

We have organized our tactics, case studies and conversations around a common list of categories called Type of Tactical Goal. We believe that these ten broad tactical goals to help you expand your imagination for what is possible based on what you are trying to accomplish.

We also recognize that defenders want to find examples and resources based on human rights issue, country/region, and other kinds of tags - so we have included this as well.

Training and mentoring

We are very excited to introduce an entire section of our website devoted to Strategy & Tactics Training! This section will be used to help defenders learn more about strategy and tactics, how these concepts relate to human rights work, and how to use these concepts can be brought into their own day-to-day work to be more effective at reaching their human rights goals. We are starting small in this section and we'll be sure to let you know about new resources that we add throughout the year. (Subscribe to our Newsletter to get updates!)

Building an online community

We have improved the usability of our online conversations by:

• making it easier to know more about the author of the comments
• when a participant adds a comment, they can easily sign up to receive email notifications at the same time, allowing the participant to follow the conversation more easily
• smart-phone and ipad friendly - we spent a lot of time building a robust framework that will allow conversation participants to follow the conversation on-the-go via their mobile device

We have also made the site "lighter" so that you won't need so much bandwidth to download the information you are looking for.

We would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have regarding this new website! Please send us a message with suggestions. Also - add a comment below to tell us what you think!

And finally, we are the MOST excited about introducing our Arabic online platform in January 2013! Stay tuned!

Yours truly,

Kristin Antin - New Tactics Online Community Builder