Sharing ideas enhances learning; and learning skills-transfer. Knowledge is not only power: it brings the ability to realize one’s potential. Sharing your ideas through the Urunji blog not only builds your skills as a budding blogger, it helps experienced writers to harness their writing skills.
We would like to give you the opportunity to write in the Urunji Child-Care Trust blog. Here are our guidelines for article submission:
Submit original articles only: plagiarism never pays
You actually are doing yourself as a writer and Urunji Child-Care Trust as your platform good when you submit original stories. We hate to see ourselves posting intellectual property of someone. So do the owners of that content… so do search engines like Google.
Urunji utilizes state-of-the-art technology to ensure that we catch plagiarism before it spreads like wild fire on our website. When you submit original content you actually are building your self-confidence as a writer. It does you more good than harm even if the story doesn’t sound interesting or good enough.
Even if English is your first language, always ask a trusted friend or family member who is proficient at English to proof-read your write-up.
When you are both satisfied, please submit your article (as a Microsoft Word attachment), short bio and most recent passport size photograph by email to info@urunjichildcare.org
Duplicated content versus plagiarism
Even if the content you are submitting is fully owned by you, the fact that it was previously published elsewhere makes systems to report plagiarism. Avoid the temptation of submitting it to more than one website. Instead of submitting your article to more than one website, consider submitting it to one website then share the link with friends. You can also boost its reach by using social media. Urunji Child-Care Trust usually promotes articles on our website on social media.
Moral of the story: The surest way to improve your credibility as a blogger is to ensure you avoid multiple article submission.
Paragraphs and wording
We love short stories between 350-750 words. The longer an article is, the likelihood is that people won’t finish reading it. Keep it short and sweet!
Our website uses Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) which uses code to display content. Regular formatting we are all used to in Microsoft Word is interpreted differently by computer language.
To spare us time editing your article before it is published, kindly follow these few tips:
Use only Calibri, Arial or Times New Roman font
Instead of using indent, skip a line to create a paragraph
Do not underline words
Names should be capitalized. For example: German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Quotations should be in emphasized text (italics)
The first paragraph should be no more than 40 words
Do not use UPPERCASE – sentence case is the way to go
Write on real issues – you will get better results
What to write
Let’s leave issues about politics, sport or Kim Kardashian with entertainment websites.
The challenge that non-profit blogs face is that they want to share success stories only. We want to share failures the NGO sector is facing so that we are real and our stories are exciting. Pointing out failures is not fault finding neither is it comparing Urunji with other organizations. Every house has its own challenges and best practices.
Do not write articles on racial issues or those which promote religion, radicalization or politics. We understand there is now the issue of protecting minority rights all over the world. However, there are many organizations that are already lobbying for those rights. As such, we want to minimize as much as possible authoring articles that seem to be lobbying for minority rights.
The Urunji website is a child-friendly site. Please ensure your articles do not contain offensive or sexually explicit content.
Images and link policy
Articles sometimes sound awesome when a live link (anchor text) is put in the wording. As a blogger you want sometimes to build links to your site. We love giving back and we surely should. However, we want to do things with integrity. That is why we will only:
Link to websites that have an SSL certificate installed. These are websites that start with https: instead of http:
Provide not more than one link
Link to websites that have a page rank of 5 and below
Publish photographs or images that do not have copyright protection.
Identifying the author
People love to associate the article with the author. When submitting your article, include a short bio of yourself and also a passport size photo where there are no objects or other people in the background. We discourage ‘selfies’ as author photos. Please ask someone to take a good quality photo instead. Only write your bio in the third person.
For example:
Janice Person is a seasoned writer who loves sharing ideas on climate change and science. She has authored many articles….
How soon will my article be published?
Articles that do not have spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors are normally published faster than those that need to be heavily edited. We endeavor to publish articles as soon as we receive them and in most cases not later than 3 days. Please contact us if your article has not been published after 3 days following submission.
We strongly recommend that contributors to the blog share their article with a loved one or friend to check for grammatical and other errors and correct them if any before submitting them to Urunji for publication.
Note on volunteer certificates
Onsite as well as online volunteers recruited through the UN Volunteers system, our website or other partners receive either a physical or digital certificate respectively after completing an assignment. Please note that this is not an academic certificate and may not be used to obtain a job or academic credits. However, we are happy to provide a reference for successful volunteers to increase their job prospects.
Important Notice
In older blog posts our website template was showing the one who has posted an article as the writer. You will notice that on top of the article it shows “Written by Admin.” We have fixed this issue in newer articles.
To ensure we give credit to the actual author, we request that he/she provides a short bio and a digital passport size photo which will be published together with the article. This external link gives a better explanation of the difference between Author and Writer.
Please note that Urunji Child-Care Trust (UCCT) reserves the right to remove articles from our blog without prior notice. This will be done immediately we discover that the article was either re-published elsewhere or is plagiriarized.
By submitting an article to us, you fully agree to our article submission guidelines which may be amended from time to time with or without notice. You also agree to not hold UCCT liable for any loss or damage whatsoever arising from such action or changes.
Just as duplicated content, articles without a bio or author’s photo will not be published. Articles in our blog are voluntary contributions from people world over. If you have found a plagiarised blog article, please let us know so that we can remove it.
Contributors to our blog do so on a voluntary basis. Thank you for your support and understanding.
This post was updated on 11 July 2018