Photo: Ken Cedeno

They were part of a fascinating discussion on “Mobilizing Communities in Crisis” this week.  We hosted the event, along with Google, as part of “Ad Week” (think Fashion Week for the advertising/media community).  With Anderson as a skilled moderator, the panelists touched on topics like donor fatigue, how social media is revolutionizing crises response in hotspots like Haiti or Pakistan and what other non-profits can learn from all this.

A few highlights:

-Google’s Prem Ramaswami (Product Manager) showed an absorbing video that explains the breadth of technology they employed within hours of the Haiti earthquake.  Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gp0-IAsbY8.

Here’s a recap: “Google launched a landing page, featuring organizations that were accepting cash and in-kind donations” as well as “aerial imagery and the ability to upload user-generated content such as YouTube videos.  The page was launched in 12 languages … to help drive awareness to provide practical ways for people to help.  In addition, Google displayed up-to-date high resolution imagery over the disaster region and our Google maps and Google earth products.  We published a large set of imagery form our satellite providers.  We made this data available for download for any third party to utilize.  People used our imagery to do damage assessments and to identify refugee camps…there’s also a layer showing hospitals in Haiti.”

-Save the Children’s  Carolyn Miles (Chief Operating Officer) talked about ways to keep the public engaged long-term after the images of a disaster fade away.  She talked about their new campaign “Good Goes” that’s engaging Americans to help end global newborn and child mortality, and how they integrated all of their social media channels to create a unified communications campaign:   http://www.facebook.com/goodgoes

-Special Olympics’ Tim Shriver, Jr. (co-founder of their “Spread the Word to End the Word” campaign) brought a different perspective.  Rather than mobilizing around a traditional “disaster,” how can a non-profit nimbly leverage an opportunity that’s suddenly in the public’s eye and engage and advocate?  You do what youth leaders at Special Olympics did with their “r-word” campaign: create a viral, captivating campaign to eliminate the use of “retard” in everyday speech.  Check this out–they even got Bill O’Reilly to apologize!  Talk about being nimble–this video was created–start to finish–by high-school age youth, in just one night:

-Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg (Head of Consumer Marketing & Social Good Initiatives) gave some helpful tips on what non-profits can do with limited budgets: use “virality,” use video and use real stories. We need an entire blog post devoted to just this! (Stay tuned…)

-American Red Cross’ Jana Waterworth-McAndrew (Manager of Online Fundraising) talked about how Haiti changed the face of mobile giving—they raised an unprecedented $32 million by asking people to text “Haiti” and give $10.  How’d they do it?  Check out this PowerPoint on their efforts.  Another topic Anderson raised–the trend where people are relying on social media to seek help during disasters.  Can we really expect first responders to respond to emergency requests that flood Facebook or Twitter?  How accurate are they?  Check out the Red Cross’ Social Data Summit they recently hosted on the topic: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/emergency-social-data-sum_b_682292.html.

To listen to the entire transcript of the panel (sorry, we didn’t webcast), visit: http://advertisingweek.posterous.com/wadv-2010-mobilizing-communities-in-times-of.