Te Puni Kōkiri will be launching a new website within the next few months. It will be easier to find information about the many areas of work that Te Puni Kōkiri is involved in, says Chief Executive Michelle Hippolite.

A major new feature of the site will be an events calendar where we will be able to promote events that are happening throughout the motu.

This will include our consultation hui where we like to hear from as many people as possible, and it will also include some of the many wonderful events that Te Puni Kōkiri supports through sponsorship.

But we recognise that there are many other occasions that Māori are involved in, and we want to give organisers of those events a chance to promote them to a wider crowd, even if they are not directly supported by Te Puni Kōkiri.

We’ll also be using the new site to demonstrate our commitment to te reo Māori. As well as having a large amount of content in te reo Māori, we’ve looked at ways to increase the amount of reo Māori content throughout the English section of the site. Michelle says the new website will also be easier to use on the ever growing range of devices that people use to access the internet.

“Our current website was designed when most people used the internet from a computer,” Michelle says. “That is changing rapidly and the new site has been designed to take into account all the other tools that people use like their smart phones and tablets.”

Where to next with Kōkiri?
At the end of last year, we conducted an online survey of Kōkiri readership. The intention of the survey was to better understand Kōkiri readers and the areas of interest that you would like to see reflected in the magazine. In total there were 460 responses from as far afield as China and the USA. Koutou mā kua whai wāhi mai, ngā kaitautoko whānui hoki, tēnā koutou katoa. The majority of respondents still like to get a hard copy of the magazine and stories about events, community and education were rated with the most interest. How the findings will be reflected in future issues of Kōkiri is still being decided but it was great to see people’s enthusiasm for the magazine reflected in the feedback provided by the survey.

What was clear is that everyone loves to read good news stories about Māori success.