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. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”
2. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

In case you are wondering what this has to do with non-profits: I know many NGOs who produce feature-length advocacy films to state their case against e.g. climate change, human trafficking, dragnet-fishing etc. And I am certain that many of them could be greatly enhanced by an approach like “Us Now”.

1. Make a film project, not a movie

The biggest difference is in what you see as the outcome. Many people consider their work to be done once the final cut has been made and the film has been screened, burned on DVD, uploaded … whatever. Most of the time, the audience is simply seen as a mass of people towards whom you then project a certain message – a classic one-to-many approach.

But if you see your product as a film-project, then this implies that the work is not done after your final cut; it implies that this is something that can be built on.

2. Think “resource” not  ”movie”

If you are looking at the film as a project and not as a 60 minute audio-visual presentation, then the next logical step is that everything that you have collected to produce the film is a resource. In the case of “Us Now” they made the original, uncut interviews available on the site and through YouTube. The BBC is currently working on a similar project called “Digital Revolution” where the rushes are already being made available while the film is still in production.

Both the BBC and “Us Now” offer interview transcripts which helps them with search engines (remember, search engines cannot read videos but love text).

Ideally you would assign meta data to both the text files and the videos so that users can find related interviews from different projects. If you have the resources to go one extra mile, you could even create an interactive transcript for each interview, like they do for the “TED talks“.

The point is, that you are suddenly offering people a resource that they can use in their own work. Think about how many videos were produced about climate change. Now imagine, you could use what other NGOs have already produced on the same topic. If enough non-profits would act like that, then everybody would win. But it obviously requires a change in attitude. Not only do we have to become comfortable with having others use material that we have paid for, we also have to become comfortable with using other peoples materials. I don’t know how comfortable the WWF would be to reuse bits of an interview performed by Greenpeace.

Interestingly, some of the big players are already working together on non-branded joint advocacy videos for big events like the climate change conference COP15.

3. Open a dialogue

This should be a no-brainer to everyone working with social media. You should give people a chance to discuss your topic with you. Obviously, by uploading the video to YouTube as a whole, as well as in parts, you can invite people to post video responses. However, you should find a way to display these on your site as well and not only have them sit on YouTube. Keep in mind though that such a dialogue requires resources. “Us Now” for example obviously doesn’t have those resources which is why this part of their site falls short of expectation. It’ll be interesting to see what the BBC has in store once they have completed their project.

4. Go Creative Commons

In order to achieve maximum distribution, give your film a creative commons license! “Us Now” can be downloaded in any format you can think of – including as a torrent! I don’t know whether that was the intention from the beginning, or whether it just happened, but it shows that once you set you content free, there is no limit to how and where your message might be distributed to.

From advocacy to authority

If you create your next advocacy film according to what is outlined above, you will see that you are suddenly no longer in the business of producing advocacy films, but you are in the business of establishing your organization as an online authority for the topics that your non-profit or NGO is fighting for. And isn’t that one of the reasons you were asked to produce that original advocacy video to begin with?

What do you think? Please share your thoughts below.

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Scott Stratten has recently posted an excellent, short video (1:52 min) explaining why you can’t expect to open a social media account today and have a million people hanging on to every word you say tomorrow. Social media outreach means building relationships – and relationships are not built over night.

What does your organization to do build relationships online? Please tell me and leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. How the BBC is trying to avoid the gullibility trap

The result is an impressive document that can be used by many non-profit organizations, NGOs, International Organizations and even government ministries and agencies to address similar problems in their own organization.

The ”Review of Management of Internet Websites in the United Nations System Organizations“ (31 pages) focuses on website governance and strategy – and I still have to meet a web manager who doesn’t feel this could be improved.

Extremely knowledgeable

I highly recommend that you read the whole document and use it as a basis for recommendations to your own senior management - but with the added authority of  this being based on broad consensus of web professionals who are working for very diverse agencies in the United Nations System with very different mandates and budgets.

To give you an idea just how good the report is, here are two of my favourite paragraphs:

“the Inspectors have observed through their interviews and discussions, the side effects of the status quo: the website becomes a ‘dumping’ site by units within the organization. Each unit wants to have its specific message and services be presented on the website, preferably on the organization’s homepage. To avoid this ‘dumping’ symptom which would easily confuse and discourage external visitors, the organization should have a website strategy, drafted, reviewed and endorsed by its key stakeholders within its governance mechanism”

and later:

“A website editorial board will provide effective guidelines on the writing style as well as improve the quality of information published on website. (…) The Inspectors are of the view that the lack of such editorial boards leads to inconsistent, and at times, conflicting web content being published.”

What I find fascinating is that these recommendations are not presented by web managers themselves but by inspectors of the Joint Inspection Unit, who are in essence auditors with no specific knowledge of the issues and no stake in the outcome.

The question of access and authority

The report also contains a very interesting table that shows that most web managers have direct access to senior management.  However, the Inspectors also state that “one wonders whether they are given sufficient authority to coordinate various organizational units involved in the website operation.”

Requirement to report on progress

Below are the Joint Inspection Unit’s eight recommendations for website management and governance. However, in my opinion it’s far more interesting to read how they come to these recommendations. A lot of them are common sense for most web professionals. But ask yourself: does your organization have this in writing and is there a requirement to report on progress? Because that makes difference.

Please also note, that responsibility for this is attributed to the “executive head”, i.e. CEO level.

Eight recommendations

1. The executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure that clear policies and corresponding mechanisms are adopted for the good governance and management of the organization’s website.

2. The executive heads of each United Nations system organization should ensure that the website strategy be regularly updated and linked with and taking account of the other business strategies of the organization and report on the measures taken to the governing body on a regular basis.

3. The executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure that policies and guidelines are in place that, among other things, specify requirements and standards relating to (a) web layout and design; (b) editorial control and review of web content and (c) web accessibility.

4. For relevant, timely and high quality website content, the executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure the implementation of a CMS which offers full support to Latin, non-Latin and bi-directional scripts and, as far as practicable, be compatible with CMS used by other organizations. When selecting an appropriate CMS, they should give serious consideration to adopting common information exchange standards and also consider the benefits of a common CMS across the United Nations system.

5. The executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure that sufficient and sustained funding for staffing and training are allocated to website management. If such funding could not be provided through redeployment or other means, it should be reported to the governing body for its consideration in order to implement those recommendations contained in this report, which have financial implications, inter alia, CMS, staffing, training, language parity, adoption of common information exchange standards, etc.

6. The governing bodies of the United Nations system organizations should establish an ad hoc committee dealing with the implementation of multilingualism on their corporate websites. The governing bodies shall review the report submitted by the ad hoc committee on the measures and financial implications to achieve language parity on their websites and take appropriate action.

7. The executive heads of the United Nations system organizations should establish a mechanism reporting to the High-Level Committee on Management with the participation of all stakeholders, for coordination purposes and to establish common policies, standards and guidelines on websites.

8. The governing bodies of United Nations system organizations should request the executive heads to report to their next session on the implementation of the recommendations contained in this report addressed to the executive heads, in particular those aimed at reforming website governance, updating website strategy and policy, and implementing multilingualism.

Use it!

One of the reasons that many of us don’t have anything like this in our own organizations is that we feel that we don’t have time to care about the fundamentals. But with this report as a basis I don’t think it should take more than two days to adapt it for your own needs. And everybody can find that time. So don’t hesitate to use this report – your taxes have already paid for it.

Many organizations have excellent documents that hardly anyone knows about. Do you have any that you would like to share? Please leave a comment and a link!

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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 be it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the CMS we bought, I think the design company has done a great job and I think the company that is implementing the CMS is also doing their part wonderfully.

However, I totally underestimated the amount of time and coordination needed on our side for the design company and the implementation partner to work together effectively.

Even though both partners have been trying to do their best to overcome all problems, we still lost a lot of time, energy and ultimately some money because the process was much more difficult, than if it had all been done by the same company.

Different interpretations

The main problem was that the two companies frequently had very different interpretations and expectations regarding what each side’s responsibilities were.

Sometimes, when A heard that B was going to do X, there were very different definitions of X. And in the end, we as a client were stuck in the middle. This is not the fault of either party, it’s just one of the things that happen. Or maybe it’s our fault for not spending more time on defining exactly what each little thing means. Then again, if you wanna define every little detail then you will spend a year writing the contract.

However, my point is that if both design and technical implementation were done by the same company, then this wouldn’t even be an issue. In that case we could simply say “We don’t care who inside your company is responsible for this detail. It is your responsibility.”

The original rationale – find the best for each part

The original decision to give each part of the project to a different partner sounded good at that time:

We wanted to find the best design company independently from their technical skills and the best technical solution independently from their design skills. And while it should be possible to implement any (not too extravagant) design in any modern CMS, it would have been extremely helpful for everyone if the design company had been familiar with the product.

Thus, the next time I’m doing this kind of project, I’ll make sure to get it all from one source.

Have you had similar experiences when relaunching existing or creating new websites?

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