As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.

The video is from 2010, but it’s still worth seeing:

He suggests that instead of expecting first responders to use the information collected on a crisis map, the data could be fed back to the crowd so that neighbours can help neighbours. He uses the example of snowstorms in Washington D.C. where people used an Ushahidi map to help others out with snow shovels etc.

I think he has point. If enough people were plugged into the system, it could turn into a marketplace for help needed and resources offered which could make a difference.

However, I have three caveats:

• The risk remains that multiple responders would rush to a single incident that catches the imagination (think: babies) while other, more serious cases,  might be neglected. I suppose the likelihood of this happening could be reduced by enabling logged in users to say “I’m taking on this task.”
• The usefulness depends very much on the size of the disaster and that there is a significant portion of the population who are not affected at all or who are affected but still have resources they can spare. So while it would probably work during the floods in Bangkok, it would not help during a mega-disaster like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
• This model works only in societies which have a very advanced technology infrastructure that is accessible to a large part of the population. So, while I’m not surprised that it can work in Washington DC, it will not work in the poorer parts of the world which are also more likely to experience disasters.

With these concerns in mind, I nevertheless think that “crowdfeeding” (though that is a horrible term imho) can be a useful tool to organize people who are willing to help each other at least in the highly developed world – and that is nothing to scoff at, either.

What is your opinion?

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I have spoken an emailed to a lot of journalists over the past couple of weeks and now that the “6 months after”-stories are being published, it is starting to pay off. In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes that international organizations make is not taking enough time to explain to journalists why thing are complicated and take a long time.

I find it absolutely astonishing that I’m the only dedicated communications officer within the whole cluster system that coordinates the response to the earthquake for the UN, NGOs and the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. And of course, I only speak for the Shelter Cluster, meaning that the 11 other clusters have no dedicated resources for communications at all!  No wonder many of them feel misunderstood.

Recommended reading

The best piece I read over the last few days is the the front-page  story of the today’s New York Times. This also proves that it pays off to have media that invest time and money. Deborah Sontag was in Haiti multiple times and spent a lot of time researching her article and talking to people. So, if you want to know what it’s like in Haiti, six months after the earthquake, read:

In Haiti, the Displaced Are Left Clinging to the Edge

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Coordination saves lives

05:30 am at the IFRC base camp.

The UN cluster system is a result of the “Humanitarian Reform Process”. In a nutshell someone realized a few years ago that it would make a lot of sense in large scale disasters, if all agencies knew what the other agencies are doing and if they coordinated their activities.

At the same time the idea was born that it’d be good to have one more or less permanent lead for each group or cluster of activities so that when a disaster happens you don’t have to find out who is coordinating the coordination.

So, for logistics for example, the people to call are always WFP, for nutrition it’s always UNICEF etc. For shelter it’s a little bit more complicated  but in essence my employer, the IFRC, is the cluster convener in natural disasters.

In Haiti, more than 50 agencies are currently working to provide shelter to the people who have lost their homes in the 12 January earthquake – from “Architecture for Humanity” to “World Vision” .  As a cluster convener (or lead) the IFRC is not telling them what to do and where to do it, but tries to make sure that efforts aren’t duplicated, resources aren’t wasted and that standards differ radically.

• The Shelter Cluster is tweeting under http://twitter.com/shelterinhaiti
• The Shelter Cluster’s website in Haiti is: www.shelterhaiti.org

Since shelter is such an essential thing in Haiti, the cluster also has a dedicated communicator – and for the next three months that will be me.

To be honest – I am little bit nervous about it. It’s a pretty big job, an enormous responsibility and living in a tent for three months in the middle of the rainy season is not going to be a pick nick either. But it’s what I want to do. How I’m doing while I’m doing it is what I will write about for the next few months.

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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.

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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

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Communications is only a small part of that response and social media an even smaller part. Nevertheless – here are my observations:

Convergence is already happening

As soon as the extend of the destruction became clear, American Red Cross asked the public to donate 10 USD through text messages for the Haiti response. Within the first day AmCross collected 800,000 USD. After six days they had collected 21 million USD. Since the appeal was not only spread through social media but also through mass media, it is difficult to measure how big a part social media played. But I think that the effect was significant. Because unlike when seeing the message on tv or reading it in the paper, many users didn’t have to switch device to take action.

What I mean is this: Since many people in the US use Twitter on their mobile phones, and since the donations happened through text messages, very little effort was needed on their part. They received the call to action on the same device they needed to take action.

Ease of use taps donors’ wallets

Other Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had similar text messaging programmes. But while these also raised money, none of them were as successful as AmCross’s. I’m convinced that the reason is primarily that mobile phone technology and internet use have converged more in the US than in other countries. (I’d be really interested in insights from Japan on this point)

NGOs and non-profits should take note of this development and design a mobile phone strategy as soon as possible, no matter where they are. (see also: “Time to get mobile“)  In the US it is already necessary, because donors will soon expect this level of ease of use when making a donation. And outside the US, organizations have a chance to be slightly ahead of the curve when convergence comes to their country.

Content rules

Investing in photography and videos pays off. The public and the media have an immense hunger of exclusive footage from the ground. In the first few days quality is not that important, but that quickly changes and the higher the quality to start with, the better. Because we had good content, we were able to pitch our photos to media and got noticed online.

1 million views on Flickr

Not the best photo in the world - but seen 70,000 times.

All photos in our Flickr set about the Haiti Earthquake combined generated over 1 million page views within 24 hours on January 14^th. It was highlighted by Yahoo! (which contributed the majority of impressions) but other media paid attention as well. In the first few days, BBC Online mentioned it on their live blog every time, we uploaded new images. We also got a substantial number of requests from media who wanted high-resolution versions of our Flickr photos.

Return on investment

As far as ROI is concerned I should mention that most visitors stayed within that set and did not click on other photos or through to our site. So while this was very successful to generate awareness, it did not generate substantial funds for us. However, since Flickr’s community guidelines  forbid actively asking for donations, there was no call to action under these pictures either – merely “Find out more at http://www.ifrc.org/haiti/ ”. And besides, our role as a Secretariat is primarily to highlight the work of National Societies – so for us that still is a success.

Quick and easy tools to help spread the message

We’ve also made our Flickr set available as an embeddable slide show and share the code on Facebook and with National Societies. I have no information whether this is being used a lot, but since it only took two minutes to set up I think it was worth it.

CNNireport: From online to on-air

Finally, we uploaded the photos to CNNireport, CNN‘s “citizen journalist“ portal. While this did not generate a lot of views online, CNN used a lot of these images on air.

Video: be creative

Video was – and is – much more challenging. Not only are videos more difficult to produce, there are also bandwidth issues. While photos could be sent from Haiti by mobile phone, there simply was no bandwidth to send high quality videos in the first few days. However, AmCross showed that simply having someone on camera who can talk intelligently about the situation on the ground can be enough – even if that person is far away: Tracy Reines, director of international response operations, did short video messages in the first few days in which she explained what the Red Cross was doing. Her first video was seen more than 200,000 times on YouTube. Unfortunately there was also an incredible amount of extremely racist and obnoxious comments which makes me believe that it might make sense to pre-censor comments.

3. Facebook, Digg and Reddit

We routinely post new content to our Facebook page, to Reddit and to Digg. We have never been able to generate much attention for our content on either Reddit or Digg, Facebook however was a surprise to me. It was surprising to me how little impact it had. Our stories on Haiti got pretty much the same amount of “likes”, comments and shares that most of our day to day stories get. I would have expected much more. Something I didn’t do – and maybe that was a mistake – is create an album with photos on Facebook, similar to what we did on Flickr. Maybe that would have worked better.

Crowdsourced mapping for Haiti.

4. Crowdsourced mapping

I actually want to do a separate post about this topic, because I find the crowdsourced maps that are available about Haiti extremely impressive. We haven’t been actively involved in this ourselves, but I think we have to find a way to include these resources at an operational level. For the time being, please take a look at: http://haiti.ushahidi.com/

5. What did your organization do / learn?

These are my first thoughts and experiences from a social media perspective. I’m currently on my way to Panama to assist our regional office with supporting our teams in Haiti. This will be general communications support – not social media specific – and I’m sure I’ll be too busy to blog once we have landed. But I’d love to hear from you: what your organization has done or learned about social media in emergencies. And even if I don’t have time to write, I’ll find the time to approve comments. So please share your knowledge!

P.s.: Actually I’ve been to Panama for four days now – but didn’t get around to posting this before today. It’s great to see how the Red Cross Red Crescent is doing everything to help the people in Haiti. And it’s a real privilege to be part of that team.

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