The scale of the devastation in Haiti came to light as reports poured in showing photos of the destruction, stories about millions without homes and a hundred thousand dead. Immediately, the gut reaction at Changents was “What can we do to help?” We wanted to use our social media skills to see if we could make an impact. Curious if we did? Read on.
We help Change Agents tell their story every day and connect them to people who can help them. Now, we wanted to connect people together who could help Haiti. We are a social networking-social media Web site--it seemed obvious we’d use our media channels to help share information about what was happening and try to help raise money for relief.
Our goal was to connect people to information and each other. We wanted to help disseminate news and connect organizations asking for donations with donors. We wanted our Twitter feed to be everything Haiti and one-stop-spot where people could get all the information they needed.
Who could we reach? Our primary audience was our Twitter and Facebook following as well as our Changents users. Our secondary audience was the followings of our followers and their reach down the chain (follower’s followers).
The strategy was the re-tweet anything newsworthy and meaningful—real sources of information about what was happening rather than just posts about how bad the devastation was and to share donation/charity/non-profit information. We relied on information being passed through Twitter in addition to news sources. For example, we wanted to help make connections to help people e.g. we tweeted a request from a non-profit in PA to find the people they needed.
How would we measure impact? We took into account the number and quality of re-tweets and number of mentions about following our tweets.
Number of retweets: 28
Greatest following of a retweet: 14,772
Number of people who said to follow us: 1
On Wednesday we were listed in the top 100 tweets (#6 on the page) and our tweet is on top of the page!
Although we can’t measure the impact on how many people donated, we feel pretty good about the work we did. I know we had 3 people donate based on the work we did because of specific feedback. That’s three more people we helped reach.
At Changents we know the power of the individual and social media, and we are always ready and willing to jump in when it’s needed. And, it seems, social media and texting may be the new wave of campaigning for raising funds in a crisis situation.
We promoted the Red Cross text campaign (as well as their site) along with thousands of other people (millions?) and here’s its overall result:
“As of Thursday afternoon, the Red Cross had raised more than $4 million in donations via its text message campaign: Text "Haiti" to 90999, and a $10 donation is added to your cell phone bill.”
In summary, it looks like social media and texting is the next trend in fundraising and raising awareness for causes--something we expected :) It was great to see what a difference sharing stories and information via social media could make! In this model, one person can catapult a buzz and build a movement to help people. Totally awesome, Changents was so happy to be a part of it.
Does anyone have any stories about what they did or saw or felt about social media’s impact on Haiti? Did you donate via text? Did you buy into the text message campaigns for Haiti relief or join in campaigning for funds on social media? There was a great story on CNN about how the cause dedicated world rallied on Twitter to help raise millions of relief dollars. Read it!
We want to hear your stories.
