Social Media 4 Good » Non-profit technology

Haiti: behind the scenes of an earthquake relief operation

Timo — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:00:37 +0000

Wired magazine just published an excellent article about the Red Cross Red Crescent relief operation in Haiti: “Organizing Armageddon: What we learned from the Haiti earthquake.” In the paper edition Vince Beiser takes 13 pages to describe what is needed to manage a major relief operation. It is an extremely well-balanced and well-informed piece. Vince was in Haiti just after the earthquake and saw everything first hand.

Criticizing the right things

On the destroyed streets of downtown Port-au-Prince. Photo: Talia Frenkel/American Red Cross. (p-HTI0383)

The article does not shy away from criticism. But it is criticism that I find fair and appropriate. Vince took the time to find out why certain things don’t work and Wired gave him the space to explain it. I wish we would see more articles like this. Disaster relief is extremely complex and these complexities cannot easily be reduced to three paragraphs, a two minute YouTube video or 140 characters.

Knowing how hard the international and local staff and volunteers have been working since January, I often can’t help but feel protective about them.

Everybody is a disaster manager

However, in most cases it is not the criticism that I mind. What I have a problem with is most of the time the people who do the criticizing don’t take the time to try to understand the issues before launching into a tirade of condemnation.

In the same way, that everybody is a football coach during the world cup, it seems like suddenly everybody is a disaster manager.

For everyone who is prepared to invest 30 minutes of his time to get a good, basic understanding of the problems and solutions that all aid agencies face in Haiti, I recommend that you buy the magazine or read the story online.

Social media case studies for non-profit organizations

Timo — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:30:59 +0000

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 (watch out, here comes a buzzword) a toolkit. But in this case the name “toolkit” is actually justified. The DVD arrives with a set of cards that summarize the examples from the movie, give links to further resources and try to point you in the right direction in case you’d like to try this particular tactic yourself. The cards are also included on the DVD as PDFs.

10 tactics focuses on human rights, but a lot of the techniques can be applied in other contexts as well.

So, why don’t you get a few colleagues from your office and few more from friendly organizations close to you together and host a screening? It’s good fun, the examples are well researched and presented and it gives you a chance to look beyond what you are familiar with. And best of all, all materials are free (so far)! Check it out: http://www.informationactivism.org/

10 tactics for turning information into action (Trailer) from Tactical Technology Collective on Vimeo.

A website for Haiti Red Cross

Timo — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:42:35 +0000

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 (www.croixrouge.ht) and email.

If you want to know how the website was set-up, please click here for the configuration. In addition, I had some customization done on the theme and had an additional language, Haiti Creole, added to the front end. That version is not live yet, but it’s getting there.

The brand new Haiti Red Cross website

Screencast and on-site training

In order to make the most of my time in Haiti I prepared a few short instructional videos. And while my French is terrible, I found a good, free screen capture service: Jing.

Jing is a free software that let’s you capture up to five minutes of video and sound and share it online. It works really smoothly. And while the 5 minute limit might sound very short, I found that it is enough for most steps, as long as you do one video for each action. What I find strange is that the “Pro” version doesn’t let you capture longer videos.

I hope that those videos will also help the webmaster to train staff and volunteers outside Port-au-Prince.

Email with Google Apps

The Haitian Red Cross webmaster Charlot and I.

I hadn’t been aware that I would also be expected to set up the Haitian Red Cross’ email service, but I suppose I should have expected it. And while activating email through Plesk on the server was no big deal, in the end we decided to go with Google Apps.

Email security, backups and all these things are simply such a massive headache that I counselled against putting that burden on the webmaster. In my opinion a webmaster should worry about the site and not about whether email is backed up. I had never used Google Apps before, but it’s great! Once, you have managed to configure a server to work with Google Apps (and unfortunately the instructions are terrible) it works like a dream and of course you also have immediate access to Google docs, calendar etc.. I wish we could get rid of our exchange server at the IFRC and migrate!

Real life – outside base camp

On a more somber note: I have to admit I felt a bit inadequate in the middle of all these people who are providing water, shelter or basic health care. I mean, how does the need for a website rank in comparison to these needs?

On the last day I had the chance to leave base camp for a couple of hours so that I could get an idea of what life is like outside base camp and indeed for many of the staff and volunteers I was working with every day. It’s easy to forget when you are inside a compound and well cared for, but many of the people I was working with might not have a home to return to after work.

To cut a long story short: the needs are basically – everything. I mean, you name it, they don’t have it. We were walking through one of the camps where the Red Cross is working and even though you could see that a lot had already been done to improve the situation, what had been achieved seems like very little compared to what still needs to be done. Don’t get me wrong: I have seen everyone in base camp work every day from 6 am to well after dark. It’s not because people don’t work hard, that things take a long time. It’s because it’s such an enormous job.

The “land issue”

For me, the biggest revelation was to see the “land issue” first hand. I have to admit that I always found it hard to understand why we don’t just erect a couple of thousand tents and instead decided to distribute tarps and tool kits. I always found it difficult to accept that no land is available to set up those tents. But once you are there, you realize that it’s really true: there is no literally no space to put tents up! Every little bit of space is already taken up! I saw people living on the bit of green between the lane’s on Port-au-Prince’s main street.

And you can’t simply replace the rickety shelters that people have built themselves with “proper” tents either. Because those tents are bigger than the existing emergency shelters, less people would be able to stay in any one location. Which means that you first need a place where the rest of the people could go. And for that you need land.

There is a much better and far more coherent summary of the issue on the “tales from the hood” blog titled “Sorry, I’m just an aid worker“. I highly recommend that you read this post if you are interested in the Haiti response.

Anyhow: Haiti Red Cross has email and a website now. It’s not much, but it’ll help Haiti Red Cross talk to the world about their work and what the reality is on the ground. And maybe that will help a little bit.

Building a non-profit website with WordPress – from scratch

Timo — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:21:49 +0000

I am currently helping to create a website for a national Red Cross Society that doesn’t have a website yet. If you find that surprising, keep in mind that the Red Cross Red Crescent has 186 National Societies and many of them are in very poor countries where other things have a higher priority. And that is not necessarily a bad thing – after all what good is a website if you don’t have the resources to maintain it?

Anyhow, this project gives me the rather enviable opportunity to create something from scratch without having to worry about integrating any other systems or databases. And of course, in my mind I have played the “what if”-game many times. Now is my chance to put it into practice.

The conditions

Website must be easy to maintain
Must have a backend
Must have a backend in a language that can be used by the people maintaining it
Multilingual support
Cheap
Site should be up as quickly as possible
Big developer community

With all that in mind I suggested to use WordPress as a CMS to drive the website. The National Society accepted this proposal and I have been fine tuning it since then. It’s running on a dedicated virtual server. For the design we decided to modify a premium theme.

Below is the set-up that I have in place so far. Please chip in, if you have any additional suggestions. I hope others will find it useful as well. All plug-ins can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

After the deadline
Checks spelling, style and grammar of your English language posts.
Category header content
Let’s you add HTML at the top of your category or tag-pages. In my opinion, you shouldn’t need a plugin to do that, but it’s the only way I found to add custom text to the top of category or tag-pages.
Contact Form 7
A customizable contact form. Supports many languages.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Generates a human readable sitemap.
Easily navigate pages on dashboard
The site will have a lot of pages (as opposed to posts). This plugin makes it easier to jump to individual pages.
Google XML Sitemaps
Adds a Google XML site map.
Lightview Plus
Improves the standard WordPress gallery and has slide show features. I have not figured out how to make this multi lingual yet. The plugin requires that you buy the lightview script for 3 euros.
Media Tags
Allows you to assign tags to your media files which will make it easier to find them in the future.
Registered Users only
Hides the site from anonymous users while still under development.
Sociable
Adds Twitter/Facebook etc. “share” buttons to all posts and pages. I love how customizable this plugin is!
WP DB backup
Emails me a complete database backup every day. The frequency is customizable, as are the tables that are being backed up.
WPML multilingual CMS
This plugin is seriously impressive! WPML does not only create a multilingual structure for your site but also helps your editors with the translation workflow and even supports translations of widgets and text-strings (though that doesn’t always work 100%). Since my day job is to maintain a multilingual site I can tell you that I’d be much happier if we had this! The plugin was developed by a translation company that integrates their translation services into the plugin. Very smart.
WPtouch iPhone theme
Delivers site news for mobile devices (not just iPhones). Since the site is for a disaster-prone country where mobile phone are widely used, this could be a useful feature.

I have not installed any YouTube and Flickr plugins yet because the one’s I’ve seen haven’t really convinced me.

I am still looking for a good comments-plugin that is available in multiple languages. Please leave a comment if you know one.

What would you add to this list?

How SMS saved lives in Haiti – behind the scenes of Ushahidi

Timo — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:45:41 +0000

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 Creole.

From the first I saw the service I really wanted to know how it works. How do they geo-tag the information, how do they work with languages etc. But unfortunately Ushahidi doesn’t explain any of that very well on their own site. Fortunately, Patrick Philippe Meier, one of the people working on Ushahidi just posted a set by step explanation on his blog.

So, for everyone who wants to know how Ushahidi manages to do what they do, check out: Ushahidi & The Unprecedented Role of SMS in Disaster Response

HOW TO: organize your tweeting staff in a natural disaster

Timo — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:32:53 +0000

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:

The organizational approach

After the Tsunami in Samoa we gave one of the IFRC communicators on the ground access to the @Federation Twitter account through Hootsuite. She preceded every post with “From Samoa:” and then wrote about what she saw.

Advantage: 1. People might already be aware of your organization and might have followed you even before the disaster happened. Even if not: if someone associates your organization with a specific disaster, then he will find you quickly through the Twitter search. 2. The organization benefits directly from any growth in followers. 3. You can use that growth to create awareness for other issues that aren’t in the spotlight.

Disadvantage: 1. Not very personal, even if the person signs off with initials. 2. Completely unrelated stuff might be part of the Twitter feed, i.e. a tweet about Haiti can be followed by something about Mongolia.

What's in a name? Photo: TaranRampersad

The personal approach

After the Earthquake in Haiti a number of our communicators went to Port-au-Prince and used personal Twitter accounts to talk about their experiences. We used @Federation to promote these accounts and re-tweeted most of their tweets.

Advantage: 1. Personally, I’d rather follow a person than an organization. Social media is all about personal interactions and being genuine; a personal account is simply better suited for that. 2. On topic: If someone is in the middle of a disaster then all his tweets will be related to that experience.

Disadvantage: 1. People have to find and follow these accounts, whereas they might already be aware of your organization’s Twitter account (see above). In other words, extra work is needed to promote these accounts, something you’ll have to do every time your staff rotates. 2. The organization does not benefit directly from the growth in followers. 3. Seen from the perspective of the account holder: As soon as your employer promotes your Twitter account, you have to watch what you are saying. Anything you write might be taken as the position of the organization. All of a sudden you have to ask yourself: Can you still share that slightly dirty joke or that funny photo? What about a link to a politically controversial site? 4. Followers might stay with the account, even when the account holder leaves the organization.

The CNN approach

A large number of CNN reporters use “CNN” as part of the Twitter name. Examples: RosemaryCNN or WolfBlitzerCNN.

Advantages: 1. While this method retains a “personal” touch, this is clearly a work account and there is a clear identification with the employer. 2. Followers “belong” to the employer.

Disadvantages: Anybody can add a few letters to their name. This might give imposters more credibility as long as Twitter doesn’t have a good complaints mechanism in place.

I’m also wondering why CNN is not using this method consistently. AndersonCooper or Soledad_Brien for example do not use CNN in their names.

The List approach

Lists could be part of the solution. Photo: koalazymonkey

I’m increasingly starting to ask myself whether this could be what lists are for:

You could create a Twitter-list, e.g. “Red Cross workers in Haiti”, with everyone who is there and then promote that list. Then, as staff rotates in and out, you add and remove names from the list. You promote the list – not the accounts – in all communications.

Advantages: 1. It is personal because it will carry the voices of the people in the field. 2. Since lists are curated, the content is mostly topical. 3. You can add and remove names without having to promote new account names.

Disadvantages: 1. Twitter’s own web interface does not feed the content of lists into you regular Twitter stream. That means that this approach assumes that your followers are using advanced Twitter clients that display list content in addition to your regular Twitter stream. 2. Since the list will be new, you will still have to promote that list. This is less work than promoting individual accounts, but it’s still an extra step. 3.The organization does not benefit directly from the new followers since people follow the list, not your organization’s account. 4. What happens with the list after the disaster?

My conclusion

I’m tempted to vote for a combination of lists and the CNN approach. I.e.:

Get your staff to use “corporate” Twitter accounts for their work related activities
Add accounts to lists when appropriate, no matter whether they are using corporate or personal accounts
Retweet selected tweets from the list
Promote the list in all communications

What do you think? What is the best approach?