It’s something I’m really looking forward to, particularly since the focus is not on fundraising, but on story telling, advocacy and outreach.  If you have any resources, links or know of any people who I should be talking to, please leave a comment or send an email to timo.luege AT [the email service run by google]. Thanks!

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Below you find a presentation I have given on two occasions on that topic. At the bottom of my previous post you can also download the social media staff guidelines.

I decided to use Camtasia this time to create a presentation that includes the audio, which is why it’s embedded as a YouTube video. Of course you can also download it from Slideshare as powerpoint without my explanations.

I hope you find it useful and please tell me what you think.

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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

Why Flickr?

I believe that most non-profits spend too much time preaching to the choir. Flickr is a great website to show what your organization is doing or why it is doing it to people whom you haven’t reached so far.

1. Know your audience

Quality is important

A large group of Flickr users is really passionate about photography. A second important group is people who are looking for free stock photos that they can use in presentations etc. Both groups have in common that they are looking for high quality photos. Respect that and be extremely critical about which photos you share. I ask myself every time “Could this photo be on a postcard or on the front page of a newspaper?” and try to post only those photos that meet this standard. Please note: photos of conferences or internal meetings never meet that standard.

2. Newsworthiness beats quality

This photo attracted 15,000 views - most of them in the fist 24 hours.

The only time when you can forget about quality and simply post whatever you have is when you have fresh, exclusive photos from a breaking news event: when cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in May 2008, we were the only organization that had current photos from the affected areas during the first few days. As a result, the photos attracted more than 70,000 views in 48 hours.

Update: Please read this post about the impact we had with Flickr after the Haiti earthquake.

To a large degree this was because Yahoo! decided to link to them directly from their news homepage, but I’ve have seen similar, smaller surges when we had photos from other, hard to reach areas. Timing is essential for these kind of photos: to be successful you have to be lucky and fast. Once Reuters and AP get their photographers on location, interest in your less-than perfect pictures will wane fast.

3. Less is more

On Flickr, if someone likes your photos, he can add you as a “contact”. This means that his personal profile page will show your latest photos. However, it will only load a maximum of five photos. I have found that there is no significant difference in extra traffic beyond five photos. Unless the photos are urgent, you will gain more by spacing them out over a few days.

Tip: It seems like you can batch-upload and prepare all photos at once as long as you keep them “private”. I think that the trigger for showing up in your contact’s photo streams is not “last uploaded” but “latest photos that have been made visible.” In other words: I might upload 16 photos at once but then switch them from “private” to “public” four or five at a time over the next days.

4. Understand what you want to achieve

Flickr is not a good tool to fundraise or even to drive traffic to your site. Most people will stay on Flickr and not make that extra click to your donations-form or your site. This can make it difficult to measure impact. I consider Flickr to be a valuable tool to showcase the work of the organization and to increase visibility, particularly with people we normally can’t reach.

In addition, National and local Red Cross Red Crescent societies and branches can take our photo feed (through RSS or the API) to highlight the international work of the organization on their websites without any extra work on their part. I think this a good idea for any non-profit or NGO that has branches.

5. Groups, groups, groups

Almost every time I hear someone complaining that his/her Flickr stream doesn’t attract enough people, the reason is that they are not using groups. Think about it: most people don’t go to Flickr with the intention of seeing your photos. Most of them want to see photos that have a  certain topic and it is in these topical groups that you find your audience. So, if you are an animal-rights organization, upload those puppy-photos to one of the many “dogs” group. If you work in DRC, upload your photos to the “Congo” group etc. I normally add each of our photos to at least ten groups.

Tip: Be on topic, but be different. You want your photos to stand out from the crowd so try to surprise people. Adding Tsunami photos to a “beautiful beaches” group or photos of malnourished children to “children portraits” is absolutely acceptable and can be very effective. Just make sure that they fall within the topic of the group.

6. Appreciate the work of others

You should also consider creating your own group and ask others to contribute to it. As administrator of a group you’ll see a new comment-button under all photos on Flickr, which makes it very easy for you to ask others to add their photo to your group. Ideally this will make them join your group and become a regular visitor and/or contributor. As the size of your group grows it becomes more and more likely that others will be exposed to your issues.

7. Flickr needs attention

I find that traffic to our photo stream falls very rapidly once I haven’t uploaded anything for a few days. Each time I let that happen, I slowly have to work the traffic back up from 40-50/day to 500-600/day, which is realistic for us outside of newsworthy events. This normally takes four or five uploads or about a week.

8. Use creative commons licenses – with care

A good example of the kind of photo to which we assign creative commons licenses. The photo shows our work and the branding is subtle.

I’m a big fan of creative commons licensing and believe that you should license your photos on Flickr accordingly, if you have all the necessary rights. The biggest advantage is that it allows people to spread your message without any hassle on their part. It also means that your photos show up when someone is looking for CC-licensed material using Flickr’s or Google’s image search. However, the important thing is to only license photos under CC that actually contain  your message.

You should also think about how you would feel about seeing your photos in a competitor’s annual report. In our case that means that I only apply a CC license to photos that contain a visible red cross or red crescent emblem. Basically I don’t want another organization to be able to use one of our non-branded photos without having to ask for permission first. I am far more flexible when it comes to photos that are branded, since it is in our interest that these photos are shared as widely as possible.

What I’m missing

What I find disappointing about Flickr is the lack of  integration with Facebook. There are a number of apps, but none of them do what I want. What I’d like to see is something akin to the existing “Blog this” feature in Flickr that would allow me to selective add photos to the album of our Facebook page. I’m also missing a “share this” button that would allow visitors of our photostream to post a link and a thumbnail to their own Facebook news feed.

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I had been hoping that “Networked Blogs” would help me to get the word out, but so far I’m a bit disappointed. While I get some traffic from the Networked Blogs-directory, I don’t find it an effective tool to promote individual posts. Currently my page has only one fan – me. Since this is a bit depressing it’d be great if you could add yourself. Thanks and I hope you’ll have a happy 2010!

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The film is public domain and if you want, you can watch the complete documentary below. You can also buy it on DVD, watch it on YouTube or download it as a torrent! In fact, the film project’s website is almost as interesting as the film itself, which is why I will spend two blog posts writing about it. This post is mainly about the content, the next will look at what can be learned from the project itself.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Interesting examples, many of them new

“Us Now” looks at a number of cases were people collaborate online to create something positive. This includes websites like Couchsurfing.com, a website for young moms, a web community of football fans that actually bought a real world club in England and now votes on game strategies online, it includes people-to-people lending and a few other examples.

They are all great examples and I loved watching them, particularly since many of them were new to me (by the way: contrary to what the title suggests, the film focuses on the UK). But I don’t think “Us Now” did a very good job at exploring the question whether these tools can be used to govern.

Where are the critical thinkers?

The website states: ”For the first time, [Us Now] brings together the fore-most thinkers in the field of collaborative governance to describe the future of government.” Well – what I am missing are the critics! Personally, I think we can do great things using the power that is inherent in online networks. But I don’t think we should embrace them uncritically and without thinking about the dangers.

Because, when you say that a mass of people normally knows the right course of action better than a selected group of individuals, then you might discover you are advocating giving power to the mob! I’m sure we don’t want verdicts to be handed down based on online votes. But why not, if the crowd knows best? That would be the logical next step.

Full steam ahead?

I am of course exaggerating slightly. But “Us Now” is so one-sided and focused on advocating for going full steam ahead, that I feel myself backing away and saying: “Wait? Have you thought this through?” I think it’s a pity the producers didn’t spend any time looking at the risk that these tools could be used to cause harm.

Here are three questions which could have been discussed:

• What are the risks that the weight of the cloud will suppress the interests of minorities?
• If we were to crowdsource part of the decision-making process in government, is there a risk of everything becoming even more populist?
• Could someone orchestrate a genocide with the help of social media tools? And if so, how could this be prevented?

I’m not saying that we should stop exploring social media as a means to inform government. I think it has great potential to do that! But before we start putting decision-making power into Facebook-apps, I think we should also discuss these questions. And even though I liked the film, I think it is a shame that no time was spent on that.

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