By Rita Ekelund

The Infopankki website has served immigrants for over 10 years, offering reliable and up-to-date information to support integration. The service is also a matchless source of information for anyone interested in Finnish society and Finnish municipal services.

Infopankki (information bank) serves users in 12 languages. The topics range from how to find work to housing, from studies to social security to languages courses.

“In addition to allowing immigrants and those planning to move to Finland to browse information on their own, Infopankki also helps those providing multilingual customer information services,” says Eija Kyllönen-Saarnio, Infopankki’s editor-in-chief and the leader of the five-member editorial team. “The language versions are identical in content, which makes the service easy to use – you can jump from any page to the corresponding page in another language.”

Infopankki is attracting a growing number of users. “So far we’ve had a million visits this year,” says information officer Jaana Rytkönen. Half of the visits are from other countries than Finland.

The most popular languages are Finnish, English, Russian and Arabic. The topics with the highest numbers of searches are for work, entrepreneurship and Finnish language courses.

To make it easier to find language courses, the Infopankki team has produced an online service titled Finnish Courses. It lists not only Finnish but also Swedish language courses of different prices and for different levels of learners.

“Course organizers enter their information into the system themselves,” Kyllönen-Saarnio says and hints, “Next spring’s courses may still have space.”

www.infopankki.fi
www.finnishcourses.fi

Translated by Johanna Lemola

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