Social Media 4 Good

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

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:

Recent announcements by Google make me think, that the company might go down a path that would ultimately mean more inequality, a worse position for developing countries and a widening digital divide.
I’m referring specifically to Chrome OS, Google’s new operating system, and the announcement that Google would dump Google Gears, a service that makes it possible to use services like GoogleDocs offline. In both cases, Google emphasized the importance of cloud computing as opposed to working offline. The idea is that[...]

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.

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 on the[...]

Rebecca Leaman has created a list of “100 Online Tools for Non-Profits”. What I like most about it: she doesn’t focus on the cool and trendy but on the workhorses that help to run any organization.

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