My organization recently held a big international conference in Nairobi with around 1,000 participants from all over the world. When our staff got back, almost every single one of them had a virus on their computers that would pop up pornographic ads every few minutes. Lovely. Apparently there was one central computer where everybody brought their USB sticks if they wanted to print something and that is how the virus spread. I know, it’s ironic for an organization that deals with[...]
Archive for the ‘Red Cross Red Crescent’ Category
I like well made advocacy videos – and the one that British Red Cross released today definitely falls into this category. It features Konnie Huq, a well know and very sexy tv-presenter (well known in the UK). The question is: “Would you still want to kiss her, if she was HIV positive?” The reason this video was made is a survey that British Red Cross commissioned of 16-25-year-olds in the UK. The result: Even though 85 per cent know you cannot[...]
One of my projects over the last few months was to write and get approval for social media staff guidelines for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). I’m sharing them because I hope that they will be useful to other organizations who are working on similar documents.
I find it surprising that there are not more good distance learning and e-learning programmes for aid workers and that the ones that exist are so hard to find. Here is a number of courses and programmes that I know of. Please leave a comment if you know of any others. In this list I am focusing on courses that offer specific skills for humanitarian aid workers and not on more general courses that can also be useful for people[...]
October 15 is Blog Action Day – an annual event where a bunch of activists are trying to focus the attention of the entire world on one topic. Their method: Get as many bloggers as possible to write about this topic. No matter what the normal topic of the blog is, no matter whether it is a long or a very short post. Basically they are trying to flood the web with their chosen issue for a day, which would then[...]
Update (4 November 2009): the Social media guidelines have been approved. Two month ago I wrote that I had started to create social media staff guidelines for my organization. Here is a short update: Since my last post, I spoke to all relevant stakeholders in the organization. In my case these were the Communications Department, Human Resources, the Staff Association, the Security Unit, IT, the Legal Unit. I also met with both the Undersecretary General and the Director who oversee these[...]
Four major disasters in less than 72 hours – what a week! For us, it is the first time that we are employing social media consistently and as a major tool to tell people about what is happening in an ongoing disaster relief operation. I’ll update you soon and will try to share statistics about what worked and what didn’t.
My organization is currently working on a major web relaunch: we are moving our public facing website and our two extranets to a CMS and will give them a new, similar look and feel. In a series of articles I will describe what I have learned during the process. This is the first part. Lesson learned: Don’t split the contracts for the design-part and the technical implementation! If I could go back in time and do one thing differently, this would[...]
