source: http://ccf.org.sg/
Who are they?
Children’s Cancer Foundation helps to improve the quality of life of children with cancer and their families through enhancing their emotional, social and medical well-being. Their visions are to become a world-class provider of resources and psycho-social services to children and families impacted by childhood cancer.
What do they do?
The Children’s Cancer Foundation provides services such as counselling services to children and families that are diagnosed with cancer. These professional social workers and counsellors help the child and the family to better cope with the illness that they are suffering; and lastly to bravely face the consequences and challenges ahead. Therapeutic Play activities are specially designed to provide a nurturing and enjoyable experience for children diagnosed with cancer. It allows a child diagnosed with cancer to stay happy and positive despite the pain, distress, anxiety and other emotions they may experience. There are also support groups that help parents who are undergoes similar experiences that they can receive and share information with each other, and at the same time provide mutual support and strength.
What do they provide?
CCF provides various services such as:
- Financial Assistance Scheme to help the needy families of children with cancer.
- Bereavement Programme aims to facilitate the grieving process and provides a safe environment for families to gather support from each other and from the professional staff at Children’s Cancer Foundation.
- Educational Talks/Workshops also organise in-house and public educational and informational talks and provides information on the medical as well as the psychosocial aspects of childhood cancer.
- A wish link programme aims to fulfill the favourite wishes of children with cancer.
- CCF planned activities help to provide a form of distraction for children who are waiting for their outpatient appointments and treatment.
- The Tuition & Befriending Programme aims are to help those children with cancer with educational needs and supporting their emotional and social well-being. Trained volunteers will assist the children and/or their siblings.
- CCF Childhood Cancer Transplant Programme aids children who are undergoing Bone Marrow Transplants (BMT) by relieving the financial, mental and emotional stress faced by the children and their families.
- They created a programme that focuses on educating schools on childhood cancer. This is achieved by helping the teaching staff and students at schools understand the needs of children with cancer, and dispelling the myths, misconceptions and fears surrounding childhood cancer as perceived by them. The other aspect of this programme involves our social workers working directly with children with cancer to ease their anxieties and stress faced in returning to school after a period of absence.
- The aim of this service is threefold: to strengthen the with cancer and develop their social interaction skills; to enhance the emotional bond between the children and their families, and to bridge and strengthen ties amongst families coping with childhood cancer.
- Researches into psychosocial issues or collaboration with local universities and hospitals.
What do they need?
CCF needs donation as they are an independent non-profit organization. Hence donations made to CCF in 2009 would qualify you for a 2.5 times tax deduction of the donated amount. To support the necessary charitable activities for children with cancer, we need to raise $3 million dollars this year.
They also need volunteers for annual fund-raising activities or some other major events such as Camp, Annual Overseas Trip etc. On the average and for each year, CCF has about 100 regular volunteers each with varying degrees of involvement. Full time staff are also require to handle services like counseling and therapeutic require special skills and knowledge.
Who are their clients?
Their clients are children diagnosed with cancer and their families. 50% of children diagnosed with cancers are below 5 yrs of age. Their services are just primarily focused at supporting the family as a whole. They also ensure that that their reserves are kept below three years’ of operating expenses so that they can help as many families as possible.
Current Situation
Web presence?
Yes. Source: http://ccf.org.sg
Effective? Practical?
No. The alignment of the webpage is placed more towards the left, causing too much of a blank space at the right side of the site losing the appearance. They have no links to social networking tools like twitter, facebook. No short stories of successful cases to convince the viewers. Lacking of information regarding the upcoming events and events are not update often. Advertisement of this website is not well promoted enough. Lacking of interaction and communication between viewer and organization. Not beneficial for the non-English educated visitors.
Website updates?
No. Their contributions are update till 2008 and Gallery and Newsletter till 2009.
What is lacking?
They update the latest news was till 2009, it does not benefits the viewer as they does not know what are the current situation that CCF faced and too little information to understand the organization.
How to promote CCF?
- They could have field trips for student to thier organization.
- They can go down to schools to give talks for better understanding.
- Volunteers speak up on how they feel about the organization when they help out in CCF.
- Oversea promotion as to attract sponsors, volunteers helping out, volunteering specialists to help those financially burdened families.
- Promote through social networking tools such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.
- They should advertise through media (eg: TV commercials, charity show, TV programmes, radio broadcast, posters or flyers, etc……)
More improvement:
- Update more events and talks about CCF
- Events collaborate to schools, for example flag days to help foundation to raise funds
- More examples of “kid’s speak up”
- Widen age range, instead of 18years old, they can allow younger volunteers to help out. (Nearer age to patient = better interaction, to learn to cherish their lives)
- partnership with similar organization/foundation
- Include “Discussion Forums” for commenting and feedbacks to increase interactivity between viewers and organization.
Addition stuff to add on site:
- Add different languages panels on top for selection to translate the content of the webpage so that different races will not have problems in understanding
- Webpage could be place in the middle.
- Interview successful recovered patients to share their stories.
