Reading Twitter feeds on 13 January, the day after the earthquake in Haiti, provided an unfiltered real-time window on history. It’s also a day that reshaped disaster planning and crisis communications forever, and I’ll get to that in a second.
In a crisis, 140-character messages on Twitter are enough to provide situation reports, give the status of roads and buildings, call for help, provide impressions and observations. They create a mosaic of information with some of the characteristics of shortwave radio, police scanners and news wire services. And that’s just one tool, Twitter.
- A couple of 20-something communications superheroes north of Miami, Marvin Chery and Sebastien Barrau, built the Koneksyon Web site on the morning after the Haiti quake. By afternoon, Koneksyon — meaning “connection” in Creole — had become the destination where families, friends and colleagues tried to locate their people.
- On Facebook, another superhero at Creighton University in Nebraska — a Haitian student named Ruth Raymond — created a group named “Haiti Needs Us, and We Need Haiti.” It attracted 12,000 members within 24 hours and now has more than 43,000 supporters.
- The U.S. State Department, the White House and a company called mGive built a system within 24 hours that enabled people to donate $10 to the Red Cross by texting the word “Haiti” to 90999. It raised $24 million in three weeks.
These initiatives were set up within hours. Imagine the results you could generate with a couple of months to plan. That’s what Socialserve.com is doing.
Socialserve.com is one of the great unsung organizations of social work. A national not-for-profit started 11 years ago in the basement of a house in Charlotte, the agency now employs over 60 US-based people and provides Web and call center-based housing location services in 29 states. It also supports the four largest metropolitan areas in the US: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York. Socialserve.com is a North Carolina parallel-universe image of what a Silicon Valley startup would look like if it were non-profit, focused on social workers, and had access to excellent barbeque.
Access to emergency housing is one of the most immediate issues after a disaster. Unfortunately, serious weather events happen frequently, and Socialserve.com provides disaster intervention planning on a daily basis. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, Socialserve.com mobilized emergency housing Web sites within two hours of storm impact. Other crises supported by Socialserve.com include wildfires in Southern California, storms in Indiana, tornadoes in Colorado, and countless flooded apartment buildings and foreclosed rental properties.
To investigate the lessons of social media in Haiti, Socialserve.com is partnering with three journalism students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’ll be guiding them along with their professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Napoleon Byars, and the chief executive officer of Socialserve.com, Van Gottel.
The students — Lindsay Britt of Suttontown, Faye Fang of Apex and Jeff Miles of Cary — have the potential to shape the way non-profit agencies use social media to provide emergency support, and to join Marvin Chery, Sebastien Barrau and Ruth Raymond as everyday superheroes. Wish them luck. One of these days, you may need them.
Photograph of origami crane by Andreas Bauer.
