Now that I’ve got my snark out of the way regarding Twitter’s role in breaking the news about the earthquake in China, it’s time for some more positive. One of the projects going on behind the Burma cyclone is the development of Geochat - basically a spatially-enabled Twitter - as a disaster response tool. Given [...]...
So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on [...]...
In
Media,
ngo,
blogs,
United Nations,
Burma,
Humanitarian,
GIS,
Sahana,
Remote Sensing,
Logistics,
Co-ordination,
geospatial,
cyclone,
Nargis,
Web,
Emergency Telecommunications,
Cellphone,
sms
Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about...
As everybody realises by now, technology is neutral when it comes to issues of war and peace. A lot of the positive stories around the use of sms to mobilise activists need to be balanced out by a recognition that in many cases, the government and private sector are in a position to challenge that [...]...
We’re going all new media here for the next while, thanks to a day’s inspiration from the Institute of Fundraising’s New Media Conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday (we go so you don’t have to). So to kick off, here’s 5 tips we picked up for better new media fundraising.
1. The best way to use SMS is ‘capture and convert’.
Forget premium services - half the money is going to the network and service providers - and use capture and callback instead. Encourage people to send a text - a message of support, a text petition, whatever - and then call them back and ask them if they’ll consider a gift, or better still a direct debit.
2. Monitor social networks to see what people are saying about you
You may not have a strategy to use youtube, facebook,...