Education and Public Engagement

Digital Partnerships

Partner with international digital platforms to bring India’s natural heritage to a global audience

With the onset of the pandemic, one thing is clear. Digital communities have become an important consideration if we want to reach out to new audiences through communication initiatives to appreciate nature.

The digital space, or the Internet, is a fractured audience, with different digital communities run by institutions and corporates. In our efforts to reach out to audiences within these digital communities, we find and develop strategic partnerships with these platforms to encourage nature content creators to share their insight and appreciation of nature with new audiences.

Towards this aim, we develop customized tie-ups with corporates, collaborate with online communities, and offer experts from the wider nature community to online arms of cultural organizations and e-learning platforms that have a large audience including students, professionals, residents, birds and nature enthusiasts, and others.

We organize webinars on birds and nature for institutions such as NPTEL (India’s largest MOOC platform), Bangalore International Centre and Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

In corporates, we have partnered with Google Arts and Culture to bring India’s forests to a global audience through innovative storytelling. With Quora’s Indic Language team, we are running workshops in Indian languages to train nature writers to go digital and develop their audiences through Quora’s Question and Answer platform.

This project is ongoing. If you are part of a massive digital platform with a large audience and want to bring in more content on nature and birds onto your platform, please contact us.

Webinars in Non-Nature Communities

NPTEL’s YouTube Channel

The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) was initiated by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Guwahati and Roorkee) along with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2003. NPTEL is one of India's biggest e-learning platforms. During the lockdown, NPTEL initiated a special lecture series to provide better exposure to college-going students on career options, research possibilities, latest technology or inspiring stories.

As a part of this series, we facilitated and enabled sessions by experts from the field of wildlife and conservation on NPTEL. The talks were live-streamed on YouTube, and students/participants asked questions on the chat window. All sessions are still available to watch on Youtube. Each of our webinars received an average viewership of 5.8K+ participants. This is an ongoing initiative.

June 2020: Introduction to Birdwatching as a Hobby and a Science, Dr Suhel Quadar, NCF

Aug 2020: Owls are Cats with Wings, Dr Prachi Mehta, Wildlife Research and Conservation Society

Sep 2020: All About Bird Photography, Dr Jainy Maria, Independent Bird Photographer

Nov 2020: What Physics Principles Tell Us About The Natural World (And Vice Versa), Dr Anand Krishnan, DST-INSPIRE Faculty fellow at IISER Pune

Nov 2020: Tracking Climate Change Through Trees, Dr Geetha Ramaswami, NCF

Feb 2021: How Scientists Study Bird Song, Dr Samira Agnihotri, IISc Bangalore

Mar 2021: The Secret World of Nocturnal Insects, Dr Manjari Jain, IISER-Mohali

Jul 2021: Big Data in Biodiversity: Lessons from eBird and iNaturalist, Dr Ashwin Viswanathan, NCF

Bangalore International Centre (BIC)

Bangalore International Centre is an important cultural institution framed by a group of like-minded civic leaders, educators, professionals, government officials, artists, academics and thinkers in Bangalore to encourage the intellect, facilitate an open dialogue and stimulate the senses. We initiated sessions for children and adults, where we received a viewership in the range of 150-350 viewers in each session and we continue to enable more talks with nature experts from India.

July 2020: Balcony Birding, Garima Bhatia, NCF

July 2020: Fabulous Photosynthesizers, Geetha Ramaswamy, NCF

Nov 2020: Underwater Architects, Chetana Purushotham, Spiders and the Sea

IIM-Bangalore’s Digital Club

We enable connections with nature experts for talks for students and faculty of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

Aug 2020: A 'Virtual Nature Walk' was conducted by Deepa Mohan and Chandra Shekhar Bandi. More than 450 students and faculty members attended the session, asked interesting questions and the talk received positive comments.

Feb 2020: Webinar on 'Learning about birds and nature through citizen science' by Dr Ashwin Viswanathan, NCF.

Corporate Partnerships

We reach out to new audiences through innovative partnerships with multinational corporates and digital platforms in different Indian languages

Google Arts and Culture

Google Arts & Culture (GAC) is a global digital platform with content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the GAC to preserve and bring the world’s art and culture online so it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere. They have 30 million global viewers. The GAC platform offers solid infrastructure to tell stories about our forests/natural heritage in a multimedia platform.

NCF is one of the first tie-ups in India in the category of Natural Heritage, on the global platform of GAC. The platform will allow us to innovate using various multimedia options for storytelling. This is an ongoing initiative and in 2021, we plan to publish stories about our forests and wildlife to a global audience through this platform.

Quora’s Indic Language Digital Platform

Quora is a massive digital platform where people can share what they know across millions of topics. Currently the platform has more than 300 million unique visitors per month in 8 Indian languages: Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam. All content on the platform is searchable by Google Hindi, Google Marathi and so on.

We have partnered with Quora to conduct free online training workshops in Indian languages. These workshops are customized to encourage nature writers and experts to create content and answer questions on nature and birds on the digital platform. After the workshops, we offer different initiatives and encouragement to our community of writers to continue to contribute their expertise on the platform.

In the last quarter of 2020, we conducted workshops for nature writers in Marathi and Hindi. This is an ongoing initiative and in 2021, we are developing workshops for writers in Tamil.

MINDIA YouTube Channel

MINDIA is a YouTube Channel with 1.3 million views of their channel, 12 million impressions and 6.84K subscribers. In a collaboration with MINDIA, we are enabling a series on birds, nature or communities and people based in various parts of India who work in nature conservation and ecology. The first story on “Birding For Conservation | The Green Crusaders” has been published.