Social media use
by humanitarian agencies: a literature review (2021).
This is a list of research and policy guidelines regarding use
of social media by a variety of humanitarian agencies and
disaster-response agencies and other nonprofits as of 2021. This
is by no means comprehensive. Using the references in these papers
will lead to even more resources. Also included are resources
regarding the ethics of taking in humanitarian and development
situations, and the appropriateness of using such photos, with an
eye to protecting people's rights and dignity. It's hoped that
this can help nonprofits, NGOs, humanitarian agencies and others
to develop appropriate, ethical social media use policies and
procedures.
Social
Media in Emergency Response.
A resource from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (HHS ASPR) -
specifically, its Technical
Resources, Assistance Center, and Information Exchange (TRACIE),
created to meet the information and technical assistance needs of
regional ASPR staff, healthcare coalitions, healthcare entities,
healthcare providers, emergency managers, public health
practitioners, and others working in disaster medicine, healthcare
system preparedness, and public health emergency preparedness.. This
resource focuses on two of the ways that emergency managers engage
in social media: posting information for public knowledge (e.g.,
road closures, shelter locations, and weather updates) and gleaning
information to help allocate resources. Disasters have
highlighted the level to which survivors and responders use social
media to communicate about issues such as: their status and
location, the effect of the disaster on their surroundings, where
and how to locate shelter and supplies, how to report to areas
that need volunteer support (and how to make donations over the
internet), and strategies for obtaining medical care. In addition
to building community relationships and setting expectations
pre-disaster, planners can use social media to identify and
monitor potential threats to public health, and communicate with
residents about threats (e.g., infectious disease), pending
incidents (e.g., severe weather), and the location and
availability of services (e.g., shelters and points of
distribution). Tools such as crowdsourcing (collecting information
from a large group of people via the Internet) and data mining
bolster these efforts. Because the nature of social media changes
so frequently and is used for a wide variety of purposes, the ASPR
TRACIE Team narrowed our search results to include lessons learned
and promising practices from incidents within the past decade and
actionable resources specific to our audience. Resources come
from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) and more.
CDC
Guide to Writing for Social Media
This toolkit was developed by the Electronic Media Branch, Division
of News and Electronic Media, Office of the Associate Director of
Communication at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC). It was designed to provide guidance and to share the lessons
learned in more than three years of integrating social media into
CDC health communication campaigns, activities and emergency
response efforts. In this guide, you will find information to help
you get started using social media—from developing governance to
determining which channels best meet your communication objectives
to creating a social media strategy. You will also learn about
popular channels you can incorporate into your plan, such as blogs,
video-sharing sites, mobile applications and RSS feeds. This Guide
will focus on three specific channels: Facebook, Twitter, and text
messages (short message service, or SMS). For information on other
channels, social networking sites, and microblogs, visit CDC’s
Social Media Tools, Guidelines and Best Practices.
Using
Social Media in Community-Based Protection.
January 2021. This Guide aims to support UNHCR country offices in
the use of Social Media to protect People of Concern (PoCs) and
ensure they enjoy their rights. Tips include how to set up social
media channels for community-based protection, social media
community management, responding to positive and negative feedback
and to questions, create an FAQ, moderation and sensitive content,
rumors and misinformation, feedback and response mechanisms and
social media analytics.
Taking
Photos in Humanitarian Crises.
Guidelines from Oxfam.
Ethics
and images of suffering bodies in humanitarian medicine.
Published in Social Science & Medicine Volume 98,
December 2013. Images taken during a humanitarian crisis and shared
on social media can contribute to the perpetuation of stereotypes of
illness, famine or disasters. This paper illustrates how such
representations create problems in the practice of humanitarian
medicine. It uses a concrete example to show how tensions arise
between medical ethics and humanitarian perspectives of the
representations of suffering.
World
Vision Australia Guidelines for online media .
At World Vision, it is our deepest desire to ensure that children
and their families are protected from the fear or reality of any
potential physical or emotional abuse resulting from inappropriate
and unsafe internet and social media use, including the sharing of
private information about a child and their family. We want you to
be able to post images and weblogs on the internet in a meaningful
way but without compromising the dignity of the people you have
met or the safety of the children in the communities you have
visited.
Ethics
and Photography in Developing Countries.
From United for Sight. Guidelines that can be helpful in publishing
photos on social media as well. The footnotes are excellent. Those
who take photos while participating abroad have an ethical
responsibility to preserve the dignity of their subjects and
provide a faithful, comprehensive visual depiction of their
surroundings so as to avoid causing public misperceptions. Visual
images are a cogent way to convey an experience to an audience and
to evoke strong public emotions, as people often formulate their
opinions, judgments, and behaviors in response to visual stimuli.
In this way, the photographer wields substantial control over
public perception. Photographers’ decisions about how to depict
their subjects can entirely alter viewers’ perceptions.
How
to use social media to engage with people affected by crisis
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
(IFRC), with support from the United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), have published a brief
guide on how to use social media to better engage people affected by
crisis. The guide is geared towards staff in humanitarian
organisations who are responsible for official social media
channels. "The platforms allow local and international actors to
better coordinate relief efforts, and disseminate lifesaving
messages in real time. More importantly, affected communities use
the channels to reconnect with relatives, seek help, and provide
feedback and complaints on the (lack of) assistance received." Also
see How
organizations can use social media to better serve crisis affected
people.
Best
Practices: The Use of Social Media Throughout Emergency &
Disaster Relief
By Erica Goldfine, April 28, 2011, submitted to the faculty of the
Public Communication Graduate Program, School of Communication,
American University, Washington, DC., in Candidacy for the Degree of
Master of Arts. This study sets out to understand how social
media is being used in disaster and emergency situations. Research
thus far has established the importance of social media in
disaster and crisis communication but neglects to describe why
social media are important. To establish best practices of social
media use in a disaster and why they should be used, this study
interviewed six communication or social media experts in the field
of disaster relief. The following four best practices were
established: plan for social media use before a disaster occurs,
utilize popular and relevant social media tools, localize
disasters in social media use, and utilize mapping efforts. These
best practices explain the best ways to utilize social media in
disaster relief as well as explain why those tools will work best.
Ethics
in Nonprofit photography
A list of policies and considerations for taking photos in nonprofit
work. Practical, straight-forward information. .
Fifteen
years of social media in emergencies: A retrospective review and
future directions for crisis Informatics
By Christian Reuter and Marc-André Kaufhold. Published: 27 September
2017. This article aimed to recapitulate 15 years of social
media in emergencies and its research with a special emphasis on
use patterns, role patterns and perception patterns that can be
found across different cases to point out what has been achieved
so far, and what future potentials exist.
Ethics
in Nonprofit photography
A list of policies and considerations for taking photos in nonprofit
work. Practical, straight-forward information. .
wateraid.org
Ethical Image Policy
The gathering of images can cause harm if it is not carried out
to a high ethical standard and they can cause offence if they are
intrusive or inappropriate. The use of images can also be
counter-productive if they are reproduced inaccurately or with
manipulation. As a people-centred organisation, we must do our
utmost to ensure we treat people with dignity and respect. This
extends to all aspects of image gathering and reproduction.
Ethical
Considerations When Using Social Media for Evidence Generation
A publication from UNICEF. When engaging with social media and
indeed most technology, thoughtfulness, reflection and ongoing
interrogation is required. This paper examines the benefits, risks
and ethical considerations when undertaking evidence generation:
(a) using social media platforms and (b) using third-party data
collected and analysed by social media services. It is
supplemented by practical tools to support reflection on the
ethical use of social media platforms and social media data.
Disaster
Management and Social Media Use for Decision Making by
Humanitarian Organizations
Published in: 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System
Sciences (HICSS). In times of a crisis, disasters or extreme
events, affected people use social media solutions to share
information about the situation. Hence, the use of this
information for supporting humanitarian operations is becoming a
valuable source to develop a real time understanding about the
situation even before they arrive at the ground. From a scholarly
perspective, the use of social media management during and after a
disaster has hit has been researched, but no special focus has
been given to the needs of humanitarian organizations and how
their management phases can be supported by social media analytics
in real time. In this research, we will identify the few papers
that have been concerned with this topic and will apply a
theoretical lens from disaster management to investigate viable
areas where social media research can support humanitarian
organization in the different phases of disaster response.
The
Rise of the Digital Humanitarian: How Social Media is Changing
Crisis Situations, and What Any Leader Can Learn from It.
2014. Digital humanitarians are volunteers from all over the world
who support research and relief efforts through online work. Digital
humanitarianism can make vital information available faster –
sometimes days or weeks faster – than the slow and sometimes
conflicting trickle of information available on the ground.
Crisis mapping is one common means of digital humanitarianism. In
the days following the Haiti earthquake, volunteers combed through
victims’ texts, Facebook posts, and other online messages and the
information they gathered was curated and compiled online to help
disaster-response organizations determine when and where to deliver
aid. Crisis mappers layer social media generated data with satellite
imagery when available to evaluate road conditions in crisis areas,
providing up-to-the-minute maps for aid organizations. What does it
mean to be a digital humanitarian, and how is it changing disaster
response? Dr. Kerrie Aman Carfagno, McIntire School of Commerce
Lecturer at the University of Virginia and graduate of the
Center for Values-Driven Leadership’s doctoral program, set out to
discover exactly that through her dissertation on the role of social
media in crisis management. Carfagno interviewed eight “digital
superheroes,” as she calls them: leaders in organizations including
governmental, consulting, non-profit, and for-profit. Interviewees
spoke of their first-hand experiences with social media in 50 crisis
situations, including the Boston Marathon bombing, the Westgate Mall
attack in Nairobi, and other natural and manmade disasters around
the globe. Organizations’ Dialogic Social Media Use and Stakeholder
Engagement: Stakeholder Targeting and Message Framing
By Chih-Hui Lai, Jiawei Sophia Fu. Guided by the dialogic
communication framework, stakeholder theory, and research on
implicit framing, this study examines how stakeholder engagement
reflects organizations’ dialogic social media use in the form of
stakeholder targeting and message framing. Analysis of survey data
from 156 humanitarian organizations and semantic network analysis of
their messages on Facebook and Twitter reveal that organizations
with higher levels of dialogic social media use target relatively
distinctive stakeholders. More dialogic organizations explore more
diverse concepts in their posts, but the themes of discussion on
Twitter and Facebook both diverge and converge regardless of levels
of dialogic social media use. Moreover, the semantic differences
among the organizations in the low- and high-dialogic groups are
more salient on Twitter than on Facebook. Theoretical contributions
and practical implications are drawn from the findings.
Organizations’
Dialogic Social Media Use and Stakeholder Engagement:
Stakeholder Targeting and Message Framing
By Chih-Hui Lai, Jiawei Sophia Fu. Published in the International
Journal of Communication in 2020. Abstract: Guided by the
dialogic communication framework, stakeholder theory, and research
on implicit framing, this study examines how stakeholder engagement
reflects organizations’ dialogic social media use in the form of
stakeholder targeting and message framing. Analysis of survey data
from 156 humanitarian organizations and semantic network analysis of
their messages on Facebook and Twitter reveal that organizations
with higher levels of dialogic social media use target relatively
distinctive stakeholders. More dialogic organizations explore more
diverse concepts in their posts, but the themes of discussion on
Twitter and Facebook both diverge and converge regardless of levels
of dialogic social media use. Moreover, the semantic differences
among the organizations in the low- and high-dialogic groups are
more salient on Twitter than on Facebook. Theoretical contributions
and practical implications are drawn from the findings.
Examples
of a Social Media Policy for Non-Profit Organizations
The Houston Chronicle examined the social media policies of four
nonprofits - National Public Radio, International Red Cross,
Smithsonian Institution and the The American Institute of Architects
- and found several common themes are apparent, despite the diverse
purposes of these organizations.
Also see:
- Daily, Mandatory, Minimal Tasks for
Nonprofits on Facebook & Other Social Media
There are a lot of nonprofits using Facebook and other social
media just to post to press releases. And if that's how your
nonprofit, NGO or government agency is using social media, then
your organization is missing out on most of the benefits you
could gain from such. Facebook, Twitter and other social media
are all about engagement. Social media is NOT one-way
communication; you want people and organizations to read your
information, but you also want them to respond to it. And they
want YOU to respond to what THEY are saying. I broke these
must-do tasks down into the most simple, basic list as possible
- these tasks take minutes, not hours, a day.
- The Nonprofit & NGO Guide to Using
Reddit
As of July 2019, Reddit ranked as the No. 5 most visited website
in the USA and No. 13 in the world. Reddit is a community of
communities, and its communities are called subreddits. A
subreddit can have a focus on a geographic area, a book, a
celebrity, a particular time in history, a specific hobby -
anything. Statistics suggest that 74% of Reddit users are male.
Users tend to be significantly younger than other online
communities like Facebook with less than 1% of users being 65 or
over. If you want to reach a younger demographic regarding your
volunteering opportunities, your awareness messages, your data
that shows your value to the community and more, you need to
build posts to Reddit into your marketing strategy, no matter
what your nonprofit's size or focus. This resource tells you how
to do it.
- Evaluating
Online Activities: Online Action Should Create & Support
Offline Action
Hundreds of "friends" on an online social networking site.
Thousands of subscribers to an email newsletter. Dozens of
attendees to a virtual event. Those are impressive numbers on
the surface, but if they don't translate into more volunteers,
repeat volunteers, new donors, repeat donors, more clients,
repeat clients, legislation, or public pressure, they are just
that: numbers. For online activities to translate into something
tangible, online action must create and support action. What
could this look like? This resource can help organizations plan
strategically about online activities so that they lead to
something tangible - not just numbers.
- How to handle online criticism of
your organization.
- The
importance of Twitter lists
- The awesome power of social media tags
- Why I won’t follow you on Social Media
- 14
(was 13) things you do to annoy me on social media
A tongue-in-cheek effort to encourage mission-based
organizations to do a better job with Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram and other social networking sites.
- Facebook
use to organize Women’s Marches: lessons learned
Facebook was an essential tool in organizing women’s marches all
over the USA in January 2017. They may have been the largest
single day of marches in US history. This blog is a list of
things I learned observing the online organizing first hand.
- The
dark side of the Internet for mission-based organizations
- Measuring
social media success? You’re probably doing it wrong.
- Volunteers can help you reach more people on
Facebook
- Snapchat’s Potential Power for Social Good –
with REAL examples.
- Stages
of Maturity in Nonprofit Orgs Using Online Services.
- How
Not-for-Profit and Public Sector Agencies REALLY Use Online
Technologies
- Police: use social media to invite community
participation, show compassion
- Addressing criticism, misinformation & hate
speech online
- What are good blog topics for
mission-based organizations?
The word "blog" is short for "web log", and means keeping a
journal or diary online. Blogging is NOT a new concept -- people
have been doing it long before it had a snazzy media label. The
appeal of blogging for an online audience is that it's more
personal and less formal than other information on a web site.
Readers who want to connect with an organization on a more
personal level, or who are more intensely interested in an
organization than the perhaps general public as a whole, love
blogs. Blogs can come from your Executive Director, other staff
members, volunteers, and even those you serve. Content options
are many, and this list
reviews some of your options
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