• Compfight – Search engine and plug-in for Creative Commons photos 

Flickr hosts over 6 billion images, many of them being licensed under Creative Commons Licenses. Compfight is a search engine that helps you find those images. However, the main attraction of Compfight is not the website itself, but the WordPress plug-in.

Once installed, you can search for CC licensed images directly from within a new post you are writing and Compfight will insert the selected image including the license and photo credit. The only thing I don’t like about the plug-in is that it hotlinks the image, rather than uploading it to the media library.

(h/t Manage WP) 

• 6 Tools to Build a Mobile App on the Cheap

While some people might clearly have a different definition of “cheap” than the author, these services can still help you develop an app for your non-profit for less money, than when hiring a dedicated programmer. Considering that “mobile” is becoming more and more important, these services might be helpful, particularly if your organization is working with volunteers who need to capture date or wants to share location based information. 

• In the Eyes of Others: How People in Crises Perceive Humanitarian Aid

Great study, but why does it have to be 206 pages long?

“Over the past 40 years, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has developed a reputation as an emergency medical humanitarian organization willing to go almost anywhere to deliver care to people in need. Yet when questioned about MSF, people in countries where it works had different perceptions. One thought MSF was from Saudi Arabia and financed by Muslim charities. Another thought it was a China-based corporation. And yet another believed MSF requires everyone who enters their medical facilities to be armed (quite the opposite, in fact).”

• Infoasaid: Diagnostic Tools

“infoasaid has developed a set of diagnostic tools aimed to support: community and audience profiling, information needs and access assessments, communication strategy development and feasibility assessments related to different channels of communication.”

• Beyond Kony 2012 (e-book) 

Amanda Traub from Wronging Rights has published an e-book for those who want to know more about Kony and the LRA, follwong the Kony 2012 campaign.

“This book is both a collection of that criticism [of the campaign], and a constructive response to it. The authors each wrote a short essay offering information that they felt was missing from the video, or explaining how they thought the campaign could be improved.”

The book is sold at a suggested retail price of 2.99 USD, but you can also download it for free. I have already bought it since I have been following her blog for many years, but  have unfortunately not gotten around to reading the book yet.

• The worst way to judge a charity

The LA times is talking about why administrative costs are a bad way to judge the effectiveness of an aid organization. While the points that are raised are hardly new for anyone working in this industry, it is nice to read this in a mainstream newspaper.

Related posts:

1. Posts worth reading: from social media ROI to digital storytelling
2. Posts worth reading – 1 April 2012
3. Lack of communication fuels panic during riot

Generally speaking, your photos are more likely to be widely used if you give people the explicit permission to use the pictures. The best and easiest way to do this is by publishing them under a so called “Creative Commons License”. These are legally binding terms of use that give you more flexibility than “© all rights reserved”. Photo websites like Flickr allow you to choose a license for each photo so that you can decide exactly what you want to share under which conditions.

You can for example give everyone the right to copy, distribute and transmit your photos but not to alter it or use it for commercial purposes. This license has the technical designation “CC by-nc-nd” (stands for: Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works) and  is the recommended license for most non-profit photos.

Below is a flow chart that helps you decide when to publish photos under this license and when to attach “all rights reserved”.

Decision matrix - click image to see a larger version.

The basic idea of this matrix is that photos that contain branding should be shared more widely under CC than photos that do not contain branding. The reason for this is that I have personally seen photos being taken from one NGO and reused on another NGOs website, which is something you don’t want to happen and is less likely if the photo contains branding.

Control distribution by controlling resolution

Of course people might still take your photos without permission, even when you have protected them with “all rights reserved”. That is why I recommend that you upload photos which you don’t want to share through CC with a comparatively low resolution such as 1024 x 786. At the same time, you should always include a sentence beneath each photo saying that higher resolution versions can be requested by email.

Make absolutely sure you have all rights

A word on rights: Images shot by staff or by consultants working for an NGO are normally the property of the organization, so you can do what you want with them – check this with your photo department or media unit. However, if you buy or accept photos for free from anyone who does not work for you, make sure that he gives you explicit permission to use the photos and distribute them under creative commons license in writing. I know of an organization that received photos for free after the Tsunami, shared them with the media (not even under creative commons license) and was later sued for royalties.

Related posts:

1. Photographer sues AFP for 120 million over Twitter-photos
2. Posts worth reading: From finding photos and building apps to aid efficiency and communication
3. YouTube’s new guide for non-profit organizations

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.

Related posts:

1. Non-profits and social media: how to leave the competition behind
2. Behind the scenes of the American Red Cross Digital Operations Centre
3. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”

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.

Related posts:

1. Behind the scenes of the American Red Cross Digital Operations Centre
2. Sharing photos online – a decision matrix for non-profit organizations

Why Flickr?

I believe that most non-profits spend too much time preaching to the choir. Flickr is a great website to show what your organization is doing or why it is doing it to people whom you haven’t reached so far.

1. Know your audience

Quality is important

A large group of Flickr users is really passionate about photography. A second important group is people who are looking for free stock photos that they can use in presentations etc. Both groups have in common that they are looking for high quality photos. Respect that and be extremely critical about which photos you share. I ask myself every time “Could this photo be on a postcard or on the front page of a newspaper?” and try to post only those photos that meet this standard. Please note: photos of conferences or internal meetings never meet that standard.

2. Newsworthiness beats quality

This photo attracted 15,000 views - most of them in the fist 24 hours.

The only time when you can forget about quality and simply post whatever you have is when you have fresh, exclusive photos from a breaking news event: when cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in May 2008, we were the only organization that had current photos from the affected areas during the first few days. As a result, the photos attracted more than 70,000 views in 48 hours.

Update: Please read this post about the impact we had with Flickr after the Haiti earthquake.

To a large degree this was because Yahoo! decided to link to them directly from their news homepage, but I’ve have seen similar, smaller surges when we had photos from other, hard to reach areas. Timing is essential for these kind of photos: to be successful you have to be lucky and fast. Once Reuters and AP get their photographers on location, interest in your less-than perfect pictures will wane fast.

3. Less is more

On Flickr, if someone likes your photos, he can add you as a “contact”. This means that his personal profile page will show your latest photos. However, it will only load a maximum of five photos. I have found that there is no significant difference in extra traffic beyond five photos. Unless the photos are urgent, you will gain more by spacing them out over a few days.

Tip: It seems like you can batch-upload and prepare all photos at once as long as you keep them “private”. I think that the trigger for showing up in your contact’s photo streams is not “last uploaded” but “latest photos that have been made visible.” In other words: I might upload 16 photos at once but then switch them from “private” to “public” four or five at a time over the next days.

4. Understand what you want to achieve

Flickr is not a good tool to fundraise or even to drive traffic to your site. Most people will stay on Flickr and not make that extra click to your donations-form or your site. This can make it difficult to measure impact. I consider Flickr to be a valuable tool to showcase the work of the organization and to increase visibility, particularly with people we normally can’t reach.

In addition, National and local Red Cross Red Crescent societies and branches can take our photo feed (through RSS or the API) to highlight the international work of the organization on their websites without any extra work on their part. I think this a good idea for any non-profit or NGO that has branches.

5. Groups, groups, groups

Almost every time I hear someone complaining that his/her Flickr stream doesn’t attract enough people, the reason is that they are not using groups. Think about it: most people don’t go to Flickr with the intention of seeing your photos. Most of them want to see photos that have a  certain topic and it is in these topical groups that you find your audience. So, if you are an animal-rights organization, upload those puppy-photos to one of the many “dogs” group. If you work in DRC, upload your photos to the “Congo” group etc. I normally add each of our photos to at least ten groups.

Tip: Be on topic, but be different. You want your photos to stand out from the crowd so try to surprise people. Adding Tsunami photos to a “beautiful beaches” group or photos of malnourished children to “children portraits” is absolutely acceptable and can be very effective. Just make sure that they fall within the topic of the group.

6. Appreciate the work of others

You should also consider creating your own group and ask others to contribute to it. As administrator of a group you’ll see a new comment-button under all photos on Flickr, which makes it very easy for you to ask others to add their photo to your group. Ideally this will make them join your group and become a regular visitor and/or contributor. As the size of your group grows it becomes more and more likely that others will be exposed to your issues.

7. Flickr needs attention

I find that traffic to our photo stream falls very rapidly once I haven’t uploaded anything for a few days. Each time I let that happen, I slowly have to work the traffic back up from 40-50/day to 500-600/day, which is realistic for us outside of newsworthy events. This normally takes four or five uploads or about a week.

8. Use creative commons licenses – with care

A good example of the kind of photo to which we assign creative commons licenses. The photo shows our work and the branding is subtle.

I’m a big fan of creative commons licensing and believe that you should license your photos on Flickr accordingly, if you have all the necessary rights. The biggest advantage is that it allows people to spread your message without any hassle on their part. It also means that your photos show up when someone is looking for CC-licensed material using Flickr’s or Google’s image search. However, the important thing is to only license photos under CC that actually contain  your message.

You should also think about how you would feel about seeing your photos in a competitor’s annual report. In our case that means that I only apply a CC license to photos that contain a visible red cross or red crescent emblem. Basically I don’t want another organization to be able to use one of our non-branded photos without having to ask for permission first. I am far more flexible when it comes to photos that are branded, since it is in our interest that these photos are shared as widely as possible.

What I’m missing

What I find disappointing about Flickr is the lack of  integration with Facebook. There are a number of apps, but none of them do what I want. What I’d like to see is something akin to the existing “Blog this” feature in Flickr that would allow me to selective add photos to the album of our Facebook page. I’m also missing a “share this” button that would allow visitors of our photostream to post a link and a thumbnail to their own Facebook news feed.

Related posts:

1. Sharing photos online – a decision matrix for non-profit organizations
2. Photographer sues AFP for 120 million over Twitter-photos
3. Non-profits and social media: how to leave the competition behind

What is “official” communication?

Then I suddenly realized that doing this might actually be really important: the rules of my organization state that we have to record and store all official communication for a certain number of years. Once a year all our press releases, appeals documents etc. get printed and burned on a CD before being sent to the archives.

A legal obligation to preserve Tweets?

Do you need to archive your Tweets? (Photo: ed ludwick)

But what about Tweets, Facebook updates and similar forms of communication? Considering they are written by someone from the communications department – does that make them official records as well? If they are, then we should have a mechanism to preserve and archive them as well. I’m sure this will become an issue – and probably sooner rather than later. However, I expect that the first time that this will become a legal issue will not be in a non-profit context but with a big cooperation where a Tweet has influenced the stock price.

But if your legal status as a non-profit (the rules differ from country to country) requires you to have copies of all your official communication, or if your internal policies say you have to do it, then it might indeed be a good idea to start backing them up.

Recommended reading:

• Charles Stross wrote a long but excellent post about the possibilities and dangers of recoding every aspect of our lives.

Related posts:

1. Photographer sues AFP for 120 million over Twitter-photos