Impact

The impact of Infobank is sustainable because it supports the long-term integration of the site users. According to the questionnaire, 38% of the users visit the site 1-3 times a month, which indicates that they find the site useful and come back to look for more information for different purposes. Until year 2005 Infobank used to be Helsinki’s site for immigrants. Because of the good results achieved, other cities wanted to join the service. Today, five cities and one region (Helsinki, Tampere, Turku, Kuopio, Rovaniemi and the Kainuu region) belong to the service and others have expressed their wish to join in. Immigrants and authorities in many other cities also use the service, because they don’t have multilingual services themselves. In fact, Infobank serves immigrants anywhere in Finland. Part of the site consists of information about the services of the partnering cities, but most of the content in the site is applicable anywhere in Finland. According to the questionnaire results, 48 % of the visitors were looking for information either for themselves or for their relations and 42 % were authorities providing services for immigrants. The fact that so many authorities use the site is very significant. It is possible to look for information in Infobank in Finnish and then switch on to the customer’s language, making communication between authorities and their immigrant customers easier. In most cases the problem of immigrants needing information is not the lack of information itself, but the difficulty of finding the right information. Each and every public authority has its own sites, but the information in them is organised from the perspective of these organisations. In order to find the information, the immigrants should know a lot about the authorities and their different tasks. In Infobank the content is organised not according to the need of authorities (eg. what a certain authority does) but according to the needs of the immigrants themselves. The service was originally produced as part of the Open Learning Centre project (in 2001-2003), funded by City of Helsinki and the European Social Fund. In this project counsellors with an immigrant beckground, helped other immigrants to find answers to questions concerning their everyday life in Finland in their own native language. The content of the service is based on this information. That is why the content of the service is relevant from the point of view of the users. The content is also constantly revised based on the feedback.

Track record of sharing

In its present form, Infobank consists of a network of five cities and one region. The entire process of producing content for the site and developing the service is done in cooperation between the staff of the partnering cities. In the process both experts of immigration issues and web production participate in order to achieve the best possible result. Good practices in different cities are exchanged and ideas shared in regular meetings. Infobank also participates actively in the network of public web services, with monthly meetings to share ideas and practices. Infobank is actively in dialogue with an an extensive network of national and local authorities and NGO’s (eg. the National Directorate of Immigration, the Ministries of Labour and Education, different offices of city administration, Immigrant associations etc.). New ideas, practices and developments are constantly planned and discussed. Because of the active networking between the partnering cities and also within the cities Infobank has also been influential in convincing other organizations that there is a real need for multilingual content on their web sites also elsewhere than in Infobank. This process is slow but it has already had some good results.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - First of all, the Infobank site is accessible to as many web users as possible. The site is possible to load also with a slower computer, it is simple to use and takes in consideration the needs of different target groups. The information is provided in a simple and accessible way and it is easy to read and understand. Lesson 2 - The content of the sites is easy to revise and keep up-to-date. The sites are continually developed based on the feedback received from the users and partnering network. Lesson 3 - The content of the sites is designed with the local and national authorities and NGOs, which guarantees the accuracy and the up-to-date quality of the information.