Amnesty International (Amnesty) has signed a contract with Claranet, a managed services provider, to support its website and social networking activities.

The contract has been signed as part of Amnesty’s digital communications strategy, which aims to grow its online presence and reach out to members more effectively through channels such as blogs, videos and its social networking site. The charity anticipates that the new contract will bring about cost savings and reduce the time spent by the IT team on administration and maintenance.

According to the charity ‘Having a strong online presence is essential to [its] continuing fulfilment of its mission ‘to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated.’’ An example of this is demonstrated in its gathering or real-time news and information via video footage, blogs and forum updates posted by individuals around the world as and when acts breaching human rights occur. This allows Amnesty to respond straight away, communicating news and updates to its members and online communities in order to organise protests, petitions and forums designed to support its human rights campaigns.

According to Amnesty's head of IT, Kamesh Patel, online properties were previously managed by multiple suppliers. This situation was complicated and demanding to manage and made for an inadequate basis from which to build a greater online presence. “As we upped the ante online, it became clear that a hosting platform that could guarantee uptime, high levels of capacity and built-in flexibility would be, literally, mission-critical,” he said.

“By consolidating our hosting infrastructure and outsourcing the management to Claranet, Amnesty now has in place a secure footing which we can build on to realise our digital communications ambitions,” said Patel. “We are now well positioned to continue expanding our web presence and provide the most up to date information on world events to our online community. Claranet has eliminated our hosting complexity, freed up internal resources and provided us with a platform which will serve us well into the future.”