A free resource for nonprofit organizations, NGOs, civil society organizations,
charities, schools, public sector agencies & other mission-based agencies
by Jayne Cravens
via coyotecommunications.com & coyoteboard.com (same web site)


Social media use by humanitarian agencies: a literature review.

This is a list of research and policy guidelines regarding use of social media by humanitarian agencies and disaster-response agencies. 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 Site. 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.

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