•  The Data Journalism Handbook

A lot of communication around aid and development is about making sense of data and communicating data-based analysis to the media and donors. The free “Data Journalism Handbook” gives some excellent tips and ideas how to understand and deliver data to a wider audience.

• Crowdsourced crisis mapping: how it works and why it matters

Take a look at this article, if you are looking for a good overview about what crisis mapping is and why it has potential. It might come in handy if you need to convince a pointy haired boss that it’s something worth exploring.

• 45 hashtags for social change

One of the most common questions I get asked by organizations starting on Twitter is: “How do I know which hashtags to use”? This list of 45 hashtags that are commonly used in the non-profit sector are a good place to start. Socialbrite even includes a PDF so that you can print it and hang it next to your desk.

• Tweets in Translation

Anybody who runs multilingual social media channels knows that translating tweets and staying within the character limit is a real challenge. Here is a graph that shows by how much the character counts normally change when translating tweets from English into 12 other languages.

• “Live with it!” iPhone app

Last but not least, something to make you laugh:  a small, Dutch NGO has created an awesome video in which they spoof Shell’s environmental record. There is an app for that …

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Photo: Greenpeace UK (CC BY-NC-SA)

Most organizations are rather protective of their official voices on social media channels.For good reasons: they don’t want to risk being misunderstood, being kicked out of countries because of ill-phrased retweets or creating policy by accident. The downside of this is, that the official Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of many NGOs and UN agencies are rather dry and boring and had all life sucked out of them.

Turning Twitter into an “all-staff” channel

For the next six weeks, Greenpeace UK will try a different approach: anyone in the organization who has a personal Twitter account and has signed up for the experiment, can push their tweets to the main Twitter account by adding the hashtag #gp to their tweets. As their “slightly nervous” web team says: “What could possibly go wrong?”

 Diversity of individuals

While this approach would make me a little nervous as well, I like it more and more, the more I think about it. Rather then being the voice of the institution, the Twitter channel becomes a mirror of what the staff members have on their minds. The result will almost certainly be more interesting and engaging than the usual dry press releases. I can see how this could lead to a very interesting dialogue between Greenpeace staff members and their supports over all kinds of topics.

A question of training and trust

Granted, for Greenpeace it’s slightly easier to do that than for the ICRC, MSF, UNHCR or other organizations who work in highly politicized conflict regions where a critical tweet about a government could mean the end of an aid-programme. But in my experience most people are very responsible and only very few are stupid enough to endanger their own jobs by ill-considered messages on public accounts.

It all comes down to training and guidance: have you explained to your staff what social media is and what kind of messages are and aren’t acceptable? Then you should be able to trust them. And if you can’t trust them, then you haven’t trained them properly.

What do you think? Would you open your Twitter account to all staff members? Leave a comment below.

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Data highlights changes in behaviour

Equally interesting is what he would like to do in the future: for example get information showing the streams of money being sent via mobile banking in developing countries.  If the UN could see changes in behaviour, he argues, then  they might be able to spot issues that are in the process of developing.

If, for example, people in a certain region stop saving money to their mobile bank accounts and if at the same time there is a significant increase in money being sent from the capital to that region (presumably by relatives), then this could indicate that there is cash-flow in that region problem which might warrant additional investigation.

It’s an interesting idea, though clearly fraught with all kinds of legal and technical difficulties.

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The panelist for the 90 minutes discussion were:  Jason Cone (Director of Communications, MSF USA), Melissa Fleming (Head of Communications, UNHCR) Claudia Gonzalez (Head of Marketing,The Global Fund) and Daniel Stauffacher (ICT4Peace).

If you have the time, watch the discussion – links are at the bottom of the page. For me, the main points were:

• An HPCR survey showed that a substantial number of aid workers are also active social media users.

For me that shows once more that humanitarian organizations urgently need to assist their staff in using social media responsibly. While NGOs should want their staff to talk about their work, the organizations also have to make sure that their staff knows what is appropriate and what isn’t.

• Traditional media has less and fewer resources to cover foreign news but there is an audience for in-depth foreign news reporting. Humanitarian organizations are increasingly becoming full service news providers, similar to stringers and have to deliver complete packages of text, audio and video to mainstream media. This also means that communicators in the field are expected to deliver to professional standards equal to CNN or the BBC.
• It is much more difficult to emphasize with the fate of a large group of people, than that of an individual. Social media gives NGOs the opportunity to focus on individual stories.
• Humanitarian organizations continue to fail to communicate with beneficiaries. Social media can be a channel through which beneficiaries can talk back.

While this is certainly a possible channel, I personally think that social media cannot be the answer to this issue. We have been talking about this for years and I don’t think that this is a technical problem, it is a cultural problem. Organizations are (for many reasons) simply not focusing on talking to beneficiaries.

• Social media can help humanitarian organizations to get a better picture of the situation on the ground via crowdsourcing and can help the affected people to organize itself.
• Social media is just one tool in a very big toolkit and is frequently not the most appropriate tool (I cannot repeat this often enough).

A recording of the discussion can be downloaded on iTunes  or watched as recorded livestream.

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The set-up is quite impressive and I think shows what you have to invest, if you are serious about making social media monitoring an integral part of your emergency response operations – unless you rely mainly only the distributed power of volunteers in the crowd. I really hope that AmCross will also make this amazing resource available to other Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

And while I can’t see OCHA ever having the resources to build something similar for UN agencies, I  would hope that they at least schedule a visit and take a look.

• Behind the Scenes: The Digital Operations Center of the American Red Cross

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If you haven’t done so yet, please take a look at this infographic which sums up the key findings of the report nicely.

Time is more valuable than money

It is good to see that around 45 per cent of NGOs say that they have a budget for social media. However, money is not the main resource you need to build a successful social media presence – it is time: time to listen to your followers and to engage them.

Full-time employees working on social media (Source: 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report)

Unfortunately 67 per cent of all respondents said that they only have one quarter or less of an employees dedicated to social media. To me that sounds like someone simply added “social media” to the job description of a person in the communications or marketing department and decided that that was enough. Well, it is not.

Their reluctance is your chance

The good news is, that this also means that it is comparatively easy to zip past the competition.

Think about it: by dedicating a single full time staff member (and no, I’m not talking about interns) to social media, you have more resources at your disposal than 80 per cent of all non-profits! Considering that the report also says that each Facebook follower can be valued at around 214 USD, this should be a no-brainer.

Granted, small non-profits might not need someone to work eight hours per day on Facebook and Twitter; maybe someone who works 50 per cent really is enough for them. However, even then I would argue for a dedicated social media person, rather than someone who has this as part of their portfolio – and anything less than 50 per cent is simply not serious.

What is your opinion? What is the minimum number of resources a non-profit should invest in social media?

Related posts:

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2. Posts worth reading: from social media ROI to digital storytelling
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