Wired magazine just published an excellent article about the Red Cross Red Crescent relief operation in Haiti. Author Vince Beiser takes 13 pages to describe the inner workings of the operation. And while he is not shy on criticism, it is well balanced and fair.
Archive for the ‘Non-profit technology’ Category
I find it’s pretty rare that you come across good, fresh case studies of how non-profit organizations are using social media. And I’m not talking about “we use Facebook, too.” I mean something that shows how an NGO actually managed to get a concrete, measurable result with the help of social media. “10 tactics for turning information into action” from Tactical Tech is such a rare example. 10 tactics is first and foremost a one hour long movie, but it’s also[...]
I’ve recently come back from Haiti where I trained the Haiti Red Cross webmaster on WordPress, the CMS which we had agreed on. I was there for one week and Haiti Red Cross now finally has its own website and email.
What would you do if you could build a non-profit website from scratch without worrying about any integration issues? That’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment. In this post I’m sharing my ideas and I’d love to hear your’s.
You have probably heard of ”Ushahidi“. Right after the Haiti earthquake, the near impossible to pronounce organization set up a service that allowed people in Haiti to submit reports and requests for help by SMS. Those messages were then geo-tagged, categorized, displayed on a website and distributed to relief workers in Haiti. It’s a really impressive system and it was up and running only four days after the earthquake struck. And what’s more: it worked in the local language, Haitian[...]
Based on our experiences in Samoa and Haiti, I’m trying to come up with best practice for how to organize tweeting staff in a disaster context so that there is a maximum benefit for the organization. These are my thoughts:
To say that the last days were“intense” would be an understatement. From the minute the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement pulled out all stops to help the people on the ground.
Communications is only a small part of that response and social media an even smaller part. Nevertheless – here are my observations:
The Red Cross Red Crescent created a Flickr slideshow with photos from Haiti after the earthquake. This will be updated continuously. If you want to add it to your own blog, you can use this code: <iframe align=”center” src=”http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?set_id=72157623207618658″ width=”500″ height=”500″ frameBorder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe><br /><center><small>Created with <a href=”http://www.flickrslideshow.com”>flickr slideshow</a>.</small></center> If you want to change the size, please change the numbers marked in red. Created with flickr slideshow.
