Step Four - Searching for Organizations and Areas of Focus



Searching for Organizations

There are two main ways to find an Organization
The Search Box or The Advanced Search.

Quick Search for an Organization

If you want to search for an organization by name:

1. From the homepage, click on the word ‘Organizations' above the Search Box at the top of the page.
2. Enter the name of the organization you are looking for or any keywords that could be associated with the name of the organization.
   
   e.g. 'Water'.
   
   Each Organization listed in the WiserEarth directory has already been connected to a large number of keywords, so don't worry if you don't get it exactly right in the search field.
3. Click on Search
4. The search results will show the closest matches in terms of relevance to your keywords. If your search returns too many entries, either use additional keywords in the main search to further narrow your search.
   
   e.g. Water + Global + France
   
   Or use advanced search filters.

Advanced Search

The advanced search allows you to add up to 11 different filters to your search criteria.

1. From the homepage, select 'Organizations' above the search box.
2. Enter any keywords that could be associated with the name of the organization(s) you are looking for
   
   e.g. 'Water'
   
   and select search
   
   
3. Enter any additional filtering criteria that you need into the Advanced search box:
   
   
   • Type of organization which includes choices ranging from Community-based Organizations to Research Institutes.
   • Area of Focus e.g. Sustainable Agriculture.
   • Geographic criteria such as name of country, state, city or postal code.
   • Scope of work provided by the organization
     (Community, National, International and Regional).
   • Type of Activity (activist, educational, networking, philanthropy, research).
   • Exclude keywords or organizations from your search.
4. Click on Search
5. The search results will show the closest matches in terms of relevance to your keywords. If your search returns too many entries, either use additional keywords in the main search to further narrow your search (e.g. Water + Global + France) or use more search filters to broaden your search.

Area of Focus Search

1. From the homepage, select ‘Areas of Focus' above the search box. You will now be searching for issue areas.
   
   
2. After you have selected the section in which to search (e.g. Climate), you can type in any additional keywords that relate to your area of interest (e.g. Climate Change)
   
   
3. Click on Search
   
   This listing covers the areas of focus (or topic) that relate to your query of climate change. Each of the headings are linked to an Area of Focus portal which contains all the latest news, resources, activities and issues that are being discussed in relation to that issue area.

The Area of Focus Portals are also the areas where you can connect with other people working on similar issues. This is possibly a place that you may want to come back to if this is a particular area of interest for you, so don't forget to bookmark it.

How can I make my search more effective?

• Avoid short and common words

If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about") it may give a large number of non-relevant results.

• Words with special characters

In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg.

• Words in single quotes

If a word appears with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable, it is better to use double quotes in articles for which this problem does not arise. See the Style Guide for more info. An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore the name Mu'ammar can be found only by searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with 's is an exception in that it can be found also by searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.

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