Social Media 4 Good

Exploring the use of Social Media for NGOs, non-profit organizations and to support humanitarian relief

What would you do if you could build a non-profit website from scratch without worrying about any integration issues? That’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment. In this post I’m sharing my ideas and I’d love to hear your’s.

Based on our experiences in Samoa and Haiti, I’m trying to come up with best practice for how to organize tweeting staff in a disaster context so that there is a maximum benefit for the organization. These are my thoughts:

To say that the last days were“intense” would be an understatement. From the minute the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement pulled out all stops to help the people on the ground.

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

The Red Cross Red Crescent created a Flickr slideshow with photos from Haiti after the earthquake. This will be updated continuously.
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.

Created with flickr slideshow.

I have been using Flickr for about two years to increase visibility of the work of Red Cross Red Crescent. Today, I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned.

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 catch HIV[...]

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.

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 stakeholders.
Easier to[...]

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