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American Red Cross on the use of technology during emergencies

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Editor’s Note: Our thoughts are with those impacted by the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Today’s post on the American Red Cross was drafted before the recent earthquake and Tsunami in Japan. The American Red Cross is accepting donations for Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami relief and is working closely with The Japanese Red Cross to help those most in need. More on Microsoft efforts supporting relief in Japan can be found here.

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Photo courtesy of International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Guest Post by: Wendy Harman, Director of Social Media, American Red Cross

Technology is increasingly important to the American Red Cross. We are an old organization proving we can learn new ways of doing good. Our ultimate goal is to empower the American public to get help or give help during emergencies. A healthy dose of passionate people, tools, and gadgets are required to do this effectively.  

For the public to give help we’ve seen impressive results from mobile fundraising initiatives. In the wake of the disastrous earthquake in Haiti, we partnered with organizations like Microsoft to mobilize public awareness and the power of small donations across huge populations. In addition to the work done around the “Text ‘Haiti’ to 90999” campaign, Microsoft worked with the American Red Cross to put in-game Public Service Announcements throughout its online gaming platforms, helping us to reach an audience and demographic that would have otherwise been more difficult to connect to. In addition to using mobile technology tools for raising awareness, we’ve also been able to text preparedness and safety information to people in Haiti who were at risk in the recent cholera outbreak.

On the back end, we have a disaster services technology unit (DST) which establishes connectivity from within a disaster zone. As Keith Robertory, the head of this unit says, “We are the high-tech in a soft-touch humanitarian disaster relief organization. Traditional IT operates in stable, well known environments; DST deploys to chaotic disaster areas.  Traditional IT lives in ‘maintenance mode’ with large unique projects to add or sunset solutions; DST scales up cookie cutter solutions rapidly.  IT’s idea of disaster response is really business continuity and redundancy; DST takes the technology to the disaster any time, any day and all year long.  And finally, most IT shops would never consider letting an unpaid person handle their most critical and expensive technology; DST does it every day – and very successfully.” In the wake of a disaster, communication and information can mean the difference between life and death. Because of the technology and infrastructure available to the Red Cross, we are able to begin communicating very quickly in Disaster Response scenarios, and are able to mount the most effective response possible, as a result.

For the public to get help, we are using platforms like Facebook and Twitter to listen to the 1,500 mentions of the organization each day.  We’ve developed a National Shelter Map that automatically updates every 30 minutes based on data our chapters are providing. Just last week we launched this map as a mobile app so people will be able to access this information from their mobile phones. We also use our “Safe and Well” system to allow families and friends to locate one another after a disaster and we’ve recently added the ability to share this information on Twitter and Facebook.

Technology has created unprecedented opportunities for the public to play an important role in responding to disasters. The American Red Cross looks forward to continuing to innovate and take advantage of technology in the smartest, most effective ways as we continue to aggressively pursue our mission. 

 

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    March 28, 2011
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