Four major disasters in less than 72 hours – what a week! For us, it is the first time that we are employing social media consistently and as a major tool to tell people about what is happening in an ongoing disaster relief operation. I’ll update you soon and will try to share statistics about what worked and what didn’t.
Seth Godin recently wrote a post titled “The problem with non” in which he claims that non-profit organizations fail at social media adoption and that the reason for that is fear of change. Here are six reasons why I disagree: 1. There is a difference Oprah and an NGO „Take a look at the top 100 twitter users in terms of followers. (…)None of them are non-profits. (…) Is the work you’re doing not important enough to follow, or is it[...]
Last week the IFRC launched a global H1N1 mini-campaign (www.bestdefence.org). What’s new for us is that in addition to making a number of the campaign products social media ready, we are also offering all the production files through our extranet to National Societies as a toolkit in English, French, Spanish and Arabic. Customizable campaign Because, even though all National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are part of the IFRC, they do want to have the logo of their National Society[...]
Last week I gave a presentation at the IFRC’s communications managers meeting about social media in general and how we should use it. Below you find the largest part of that presentation. I removed the bits that were focusing very much on internal processes and steps that need to be taken in-house in order to make social media work. (Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers and staff can download the complete presentation from FedNet, the IFRC’s extranet.) I hope you like it.[...]
One of the things I love about my job is that I constantly find out about incredibly useful or smart things that people have come up with. Right now I’m in awe of the the new Emergency Items Catalogue (www.ifrc.org/emergency-items) that was just released by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Metric? Imperial? Who cares? Imagine you show up at a disaster and you’ve brought a few pumps[...]
I recently had the honour to be in charge of a whole-day social media workshop in Solferino, where the idea for the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement was born. This was part of our 150 year celebrations. It was really interesting because the 50 or so participants where from extremly different countries and backgrounds, as behooves an organization with 186 member countries. It was absolutely fascinating to see that how social media is just as interesting to someone from Belgium[...]
I am supposed to come up with a draft set of guidelines for staff who are using social media. What I hadn’t counted on was that doing so would suddenly put me into conflict with one of our most dogmatic documents.
… at least when it comes to speed. Todays events taught me that with a bit of luck you can use tools like Facebook to cut through the organizational bureaucracy and get your job done faster and better.
