By Paul Furiga
Gloria Huang is one of just two headquarters staff who handles social media for The American Red Cross, the nation’s acknowledged “go to” resource for disaster response, not only in the United States but overseas.
The Red Cross is redefining and reshaping the use of social media in some of the most difficult human experiences imaginable, from the Haiti earthquake to recent tornados in the United States. The Red Cross experience is yet one more example of how nonprofits are leading the social media revolution, outpacing adoption, usage and engagement compared to higher education and business, which I shared in my last blog.
I learned all this recently when my colleague Sam Wannemacher and I had the privilege to present at the 2011 Digital Impact Conference hosted by the Public Relations Society of America. The fourth annual event, held in New York City, offered two full days of shared knowledge and new thinking on topics from mobile marketing to personal branding from speakers as varied as yours truly to senior leaders at Microsoft and Google.
The Red Cross session and one led by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes of the Society for New Communications Research were among the most compelling I attended. They taught me that nonprofits, perennially challenged by limited financial resources and staff, may be the last sector that conventional wisdom would pick as an example of best practices and bleeding edge social media usage, yet they are leading the social media revolution.
On the night in 2010 that a devastating earthquake shook Haiti, Gloria Huang’s social media colleague was leaving work after a long day. As soon as she heard the news, she turned around and went back into the building and back to work. She knew what to expect — a flood of posts, tweets and other social media activity directed at the Red Cross as the world responded to the disaster.
What happened over the next several hours, days, weeks and months provides a view of how nonprofit emergency response is driving the social media revolution.
One of the key findings in the nonprofit social media research I shared in my last post is the widespread adoption and integration of mobile platforms, especially texting, in nonprofit social media.
As the Haiti disaster unfolded, the Red Cross set up a simple text donation campaign, “Donate $10 text HAITI to 90999.” Within a short period of time, 2.3 million tweets and retweets mentioned Haiti and the Red Cross, and 55,000 also mentioned “text.” The campaign, linked to social media, reported in conventional news media and promoted by celebrities including the actor Ryan Phillippe, raised $33 million, $10 at a time.
As gratifying as that might be, Huang said the Red Cross didn’t expect what happened next: social media appeals for help, directed at the Red Cross. A sample tweet she shared: “@RedCross a woman is trapped in ruble in #Haiti alive- texting her cousin in CT saying she can hear workers leaving the site shes trapped in.”
In the chaos immediately following the earthquake, with communications lines down or swamped and an evolving Red Cross response, Huang said it was difficult and heart-rending to consider how to respond to such pleas.
More recently, this pattern has been repeated in the Red Cross experience with spring 2011 tornados across the American South. So much disaster-related information began flooding the Red Cross social media channels that Huang said staff began collecting it and forwarding it via e-mail to a Red Cross liaison inside the Alabama state emergency command center, who shared it with first responders. At first, she said, the first responders looked on the social media pleas as some sort of alien communication, but they quickly grasped the value of instant reporting that could help direct resources and save lives.
The Red Cross doesn’t have the answers yet on to how to manage such an information flow. Huang said first responders, for example, not only need geolocation coordinates to direct help, they also need to know information such as what municipality or county or other government subdivision is involved, because in the “real world,” disaster response resources are owned by government agencies with strictly defined geographic boundaries.
This emerging issue is compelling enough that Huang said the Red Cross did a survey to ask what sort of response the public might expect if reporting disaster information through social media. The survey (PDF) of 1,000 people found 75 percent would expect help to arrive within an hour of requesting it on an aid agency’s web site.
As Huang put it, “This was mind blowing for us. You can’t even get a pizza within an hour sometimes.”
In other organizations, social media adoption and engagement may be about improving ROI, leads, deal flow, etc., etc. For nonprofits, social media engagement may literally be a matter of life and death.
“At the Red Cross,” Huang said, “we had been active on social media for several years before the Haiti earthquake and when that happened, we still weren’t fully able to convey important requests for help directly to our operational decision makers on the ground with any reliability. There are hundreds of players in the disaster response world, and they range from local emergency responders to the federal government. What is the likelihood that all of the critical people in the chain link of response agencies would be able to meet these expectations?”
This is still a great, unanswered question in social media. Given the life or death nature of so much nonprofit work, and the speedy and broad adoption of social media usage among nonprofits, it’s likely that this question and many others defining the social media revolution will be answered first by nonprofits, not by the for-profit businesses that seemingly have much deeper financial and people resources to maximize social media.
What do you think? We’d love to see and hear your experiences with social media adoption in nonprofits for for-profits as well.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
