Environmental Defense created www.scorecard.org in 1998 to inform people about the level of pollution in their area and to encourage them to lobby the offending industries and their elected representatives to put a stop to it.

During the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, communications links across former republics and with the outside world were severed.  During the war, a women’s information and documentation center, Zenska Infoteka, was established in Zagreb with the goal of helping women who had been exposed to violence and sexual assault during the fighting.

Casa Alianza created a web site to build a strong constituency of people who would work to improve the lives of street children in Latin America.

The Human Rights Centre at the University of Sarajevo focuses on improving access to information among human rights advocates.  They built a strong information system and central role for an information specialist or librarian.  The utilization of this information system and information specialist’s skills allowed other staff to better, and more productively, focus on their core programmatic missions.

The experience of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Sarajevo demonstrates that institutional strengthening tactics applied inside an organization improve the way human rights practitioners do their work and what they can do.  Organizations that use their resources effectively can more effectively advance human rights work. The Human Rights Centre works nationally and internationally in cooperation with similar institutes to contribute to the realization of human rights through information and documentation.  Although the Human Rights Centre is now a fairly large and relatively well-funded organization, nearly any group doing human rights work could apply this organizational strengthening tactic.