Social media guidelines for IFRC staff

The International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement in general and the IFRC in particular are very complicated organism. So please let me explain a few things:

1. This is not your National Red Cross or Red Crescent Society

These are NOT the staff guidelines of the American Red Cross, the British Red Cross, the Turkish Red Crescent etc …

These are the social media guidelines of the “International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies”. The IFRC is an organization where all 186 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are members. It is not a headquarters  but a service provider to the National Societies who can take or leave what the IFRC produces. Some National Societies already have their own social media guidelines.

2. “Neutrality” and “Freedom of Speech”

How far you’ve gone always depends on where you are coming from.

I realize that the parts about “neutrality” and “keeping your manager in the loop” might sound very restrictive to some people, especially those from democratic countries.  But you have to keep two things in mind:

A, Our Code of Conduct says:

“[All staff shall] not publish any work (including writings, photographs, video footage, etc.) that has been produced in connection with, or that is related to, their assignment and functions with the Federation without prior approval of the Secretary General.”

This could easily have been used my management to shut people down who have their own blogs or use social media to talk about work. Instead we went exactly the opposite way and turned this (with the help of stakeholders who could make that decision) into “keep your boss in the loop”. This is a pretty big step.

B, The IFRC demands of its employees restraint when it comes to political controversies:

“[All staff shall] not publicly express any opinions on events connected with political affairs or engage in political activities that could reflect adversely on the impartiality, neutrality or independence of the Federation (…)”

This clause has been part of everyone’s employment contract for many years. Obviously it also has to apply online.

Coming from a country like Germany this initially felt like a pretty big violation of my rights as a citizen. But  for a lot of people in the field, being seen as coming from a neutral and impartial organization can literally be a life saver.  Many of them routinely have to work with very controversial people or even in war zones. How your organization, and the people working for your organization, are perceived might not only influence whether you have access to the vulnerable people you want help but it might also have very serious security implications.

3.Guidelines vs. policies

The role of guidelines within the IFRC is to give advice, not to set rules. Rules can only be set in policies which is why these social media staff guidelines contain no new rules. They merely look at existing policies within the organization (such as the code of conduct) and give guidance on how these should be interpreted in the context of social media. This was done in consultation with human resources, the legal department, the staff association, two directors, an undersecretary general and other stakeholders.

Changing policies on the other hand can be an extremely lengthy process. In some cases you might need approval from all 186 member National Societies and is a  process that can easily take two years. These guidelines on the other hand were completed in less than three months.

Why the social media guidelines matters

For the first time the IFRC is encouraging staff who are not professional communicators to actively and publicly talk about the organization and their work. The guidelines create clarity and reduce the risk of arbitrary repercussions – it’s definitely harder to shut someone up now than it was before.  On the other hand the guidelines also make clear what is unacceptable from an organizational point of view and that you might have to answer for what you write online.

Personally I hope that this document will start discussions within some National Societies about whether a top-down model for communication is still appropriate and I hope that this in turn will lead to the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement becoming more open. I realize that this is a big dream – but I hope that I have planted one of the seeds to make it happen.

Download the Social Media Staff Guidelines of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC); 8 pages (PDF)

Please leave a comment and tell me what you think!

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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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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 stakeholders.

Easier to embrace then to outlaw

What really surprised me is how positive my draft was received by everyone. Everybody was extremely supportive and tried to make it work – because everybody sees the need for it. There was no rivalry and no one categorically said “no” to the idea of encouraging people to use social media to talk about their work. I have to admit – I was far more pessimistic when I started this project.

But everybody recognized that social media are here to stay and that providing guidance is the best way to use social media for the benefit of the organization and to mitigate associated risks.

Right now, the guidelines are being given “nice” layout and hopefully I’ll be able to get them signed off in the next week! I’ll share them here as soon as I can. Make sure to take a look – they are pretty gutsy .

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Social Media Bandwagon (c) Matt Hamm

Here is an interesting task: I am supposed to come up with a draft set of guidelines for staff who are using social media. The task itself did not come as a surprise, as I myself had argued for some time that we needed something like this, particularly to address potential problems with personal blogs and our principle of neutrality.

What I hadn’t counted on was that doing so would suddenly put me into conflict with one of our most dogmatic documents – the Code of Conduct.

The Code of Conduct says:

Not publish any work (including writings, photographs, video footage, etc.) that has been

produced in connection with, or that is related to, their assignment and functions with the

Federation without prior approval of the Secretary General.

[All staff shall] not publish any work (including writings, photographs, video footage, etc.) that has been produced in connection with, or that is related to, their assignment and functions with the Federation without prior approval of the Secretary General.

This means that anyone who has a blog and writes about work, is sharing photos on Flickr or even just updates their Twitter status with something work related is strictly speaking violating his contract. And that means that, in addition to writing social media staff guidelines I now also have to think about changing the Code of Conduct.

I’m certain that many organizations have similar policies in place. How did you change yours or how would you like to change it?

• An excellent overview of existing social media staff guidelines

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