Using the Internet to Promote Advocacy in the Hispanic Community
January 23, 2011 :: Posted by: Carla Briceno
In September 2010, the Center for American Progress launched CAP en Español, a new website featuring content in Spanish, with the stated goal of furthering “ the Center’s commitment to reaching a diverse audience and engaging the broader community in its work.” At the time, the Center’s President and CEO John Podesta remarked “we are taking steps to be more inclusive in our work and this new website is a natural next step to reach out to the rapidly growing Latino community." The new website features original and translated content including policy papers, news analysis, and multimedia directed toward both a domestic and international Spanish-speaking audience.
Raúl Arce-Contreras, the Center’s Press Assistant for Ethnic Media, spoke with us recently about his experience in putting the site together and other efforts the Center is making to reach Hispanics.
What specific segments of Hispanic online community are you targeting?
We are making a great effort to target bloggers and news reporters by making some of our content available for reposting and reprinting. We will also begin to target younger segments of the Hispanic community by increasing our presence in social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and by collaborating with Campus Progress, the student arm of the Center for American Progress, in order to provide more content, including videos and columns, that are geared towards young progressives.
Given that the site is new, what changes can we expect in the coming months?
The most immediate changes will be to the site's interactive features. Visitors to CAP en Español will soon be able to share our content, leave comments and provide feedback through Twitter or Facebook and other social media sites. CAP en Español visitors are also currently able to sign up for our monthly newsletter and we will expand this feature to include other options for receiving emails based on topics of interest. Other changes include adding tabs based on topics - including immigration, health care, the economy and energy - which will help make navigating the site easier. Also expect many more new original videos in Spanish and new podcasts featuring experts from CAP and beyond with expertise in a wide variety of areas. The Spanish-language side is different than the English.
Are you working toward a full parallel version?
Not necessarily. Our intent is to create a site that offers the highest utility for Spanish-speakers in terms of content and accessibility. Although CAP en Español will resemble the English language version in several ways, not everything that works for the English language site may work as well for the Spanish language site, particularly in regards to content. While we do want to widen the scope of CAP en Español's content in order to inform our audience on a wide array of issues that are important to the country as a whole, we feel the best way to engage our targeted audiences is not by translating every bit of content from the English site literally. Instead we intend to portray the content in CAP en Español in way that demonstrates how a particular issue or set of issues are important for the Latino community and communities of color. This is easier to do for some issues than it is for others. For instance, immigration and the economy are always important issues to cover for Spanish-speaking Americans, but we've recently featured columns on the green economy and stem cell research, which have great impact on communities of color.
How do you decide what things to include or not include from the English page?
We base our decisions on whether or not an item is timely, and if it could have a big impact on communities of color. We also highlight the work from Progress 2050, which promotes policy ideas, facilitates honest dialogue about the intersection of race and policy, analyzes demographics, and develops new leaders with the notion that by 2050, there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority in the United States.
Have you contemplated Spanish versions of the Facebook page and RSS? Are you Tweeting in Spanish?
We are currently Tweeting in Spanish. You can find us @vanessa_2050 which is Vanessa Cárdenas' Twitter account. She's the Director of Progress 2050 and Director for Ethnic Media at CAP. We also have an RSS feed that you can access by visiting http://www.americanprogress.org/espanol/inicio/index.html/index.rss. We don't have a Facebook page at the moment, however we do understand and appreciate the value of social networking and will become increasingly involved in the near future by refining our outreach strategy to include Facebook and other social networking site, as well as improve our presence on Twitter.
Is content developed originally in Spanish ever translated to English?
We haven't had the opportunity to translate original material from Spanish to English. However, we have in the past written op-eds in Spanish and do see how these could easily be translated into English. Moreover, as we begin to work in greater depth with other organizations, including international groups, we could see more and more content made exclusively for CAP en Español.