Technology Tools

Text messaging is one of the most popular forms of communication today. Signal is a full-featured, easy to use messaging app that is one of the best around. Unlike WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or basicSMS, Signal additional cost beside your cellular data plan, is very secure, and doesn’t track and monetize you as a user.

Many organizations want to know what people think about a given topic, understand their needs, or receive feedback. SurveyMonkey is one of the largest survey creation tools out there, with millions of questions answered in their system every day. With very little technical expertise, people can put together their own form to gather useful information from online audiences.

VPNs are powerful tools to help avoid surveillance or censorship. Outline, by Jigsaw, a project of Google/Alphabet, is open source software to host your own VPN and share access with your community without risking that a service provider could violate your privacy. With some technical skill and a reasonable monthly cost, Outline is a powerful circumvention system for civic and political groups or rights organizers.

A simple website builder that doesn't require the ability to write code.

Canva is a graphic design tool that enables users to drag-and-drop feature and layouts to easily design beautiful visual content and infographics.

Critical Mention is a media monitoring and media contact monitoring tool. Users have access to television, radio, print media, podcasts, online news, and social media. While the tool is in English, it draws from news sources in over 90 languages. Dashboards tracking media can be tailored to the user, and Critical Mention maintains good customer support with trainings, a help desk, and a willingness to work with clients to integrate new sources. The tool is cloud-based and works especially well with traditional media sources. 

The #think10 safety planning tool provides women in politics guidance on how to enhance their personal security by combining scores from a self-assessment questionnaire and the country score from NDI’s new Women’s Political Participation Risk Index. The WPPRI calculates the risk to politically active women in 172 countries. In using the tool, women in politics can develop a safety plan relevant to their personal and professional profile, and in their political context. Each country’s ranking in the WPPRI is built from three indicators: the level of women’s political participation at the national level; the state of democracy in each country; and the likelihood of violence that women in that country face. NDI has based these indicators on data gained from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Georgetown University’s Institute of Women Peace and Security.

Airtable is a spreadsheet platform with database functionalities that allows users to create visualizations, processes, and integrations for custom applications.

A service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests through email distribution lists. Google Groups are not designed for secure communication.

An anti-malware software for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Bitdefender offers a free version that provides strong basic anti-virus capabilities for Windows, macOS, and Android devices. Paid versions of Bitdefender offer extra features and are also available for iPhones.