How Social Media Is Changing the Aid Business

This news article credits social media and other online global networks for the "unprecedented support worldwide" for the relief effort in the aftermath of the January 12 2010 earthquake in Haiti. According to this piece, "the manner in which that support was garnered - particularly the magnitude of the volunteer effort and the ways it was solicited - suggest the world of aid is experiencing dramatic change."

The American Red Cross took just 3 hours to launch a programme for people to donate from their mobile phone. Over US$30 million has been raised this way, with US$10 million donated in the first 48 hours by people simply texting HAITI to 90999. According to the United States (US) government, almost half of all households in that country donated to private aid efforts for Haiti. "Key to the fund-raising in the U.S. and elsewhere have been the internet and text messaging donations via cellphones." The media information company Nielsen analysed the data in the immediate aftermath of the quake and concluded: "While most online consumers rely on traditional media for coverage of the quake, they are turning to Twitter and blogs to share information, react to the situation and rally support."

A Canadian internet expert quoted here (Don Tapscott) explains this phenomenon: "Thanks to the internet, there are now new global networks that are multi-stakeholder and that are beginning to address global problems in new ways. These individuals now, at their fingertips, have a powerful tool for finding out what's going on, for organizing a collective response to something and for participating in solving problems."

Many online techniques and social networking strategies have been used to help Haiti, as reported here. For example:

• Mapping tools such as Ushahidi were used in Haiti (and, later, in Chile) to connect earthquake victims with emergency workers.
• In the days after the quake, aid workers trying to make their way through the destruction used OpenStreetMap, a volunteer, collaborative project that uses satellite imagery.
• Crowd-sourcing systems enabled missing persons data to be processed by volunteers outside Haiti, using their personal computers.
• As part of "image tagging", photos from media and photo-sharing websites were uploaded and "tagged" by volunteers anywhere in the world. These tags then allowed search engines to hunt through the images for missing persons, and match people or connect them on the ground.
• So-called crisis camps sprang up in cities around the world, with over 1,500 people worldwide volunteering to help groups that are providing direct aid to Haiti to get them information and tools they needed. Crisis Commons is one such group that worked to get the message out - and quickly - and is described here as a new way to build community and volunteers.

According to this article, aid organisations in Haiti, as well as international organisations like the World Bank, have been using the results of these volunteer efforts for everything from pulling survivors out of the rubble to plotting strategies for rebuilding. As Tapscott (quoted above) puts it, the Haiti efforts show that social media can "marshal the collective ingenuity of society to solve problems on a time-scale that matters."