Relief Web, a humanitarian information source on global crises and disasters, and a digital service of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), recently released four mobile apps that aim to serve different members of the humanitarian aid community.

Each of these app aims to solve a problem or address a challenge that will meet specific needs of humanitarians.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the apps:

ReliefWeb Crises App

– Information gathering and making sense of a fast-paced humanitarian crisis can be challenging. This app provides key figures, access to latest reports and maps, real time financial status, as well as a comprehensive overview for each crisis. All of this is kept updated in real time.

– The app allows you to quickly compare different crises and gather the history of each event, so you can follow the evolution of a situation. Some recent examples: Haiti’s Hurricane Matthew and the crisis in Syria.

Headlines App

-Humanitarian situations evolve rapidly. Headlines App provides a general overview of the latest humanitarian developments globally.

– It is a tool that allows you to follow a person or location, i.e., “Ki-moon”, “Aleppo”,
“Gender”, “Refugees”,etc., and see what has been published on ReliefWeb that matches your search.

Videos App

– Videos allow you to get a much better sense of how things look in the field better than most reports usually can. It is a resource for complex , quickly changing situations, such as the ones in Syria and South Sudan, as well as for sudden onset disasters.

– Video is becoming a preferred reporting format for humanitarians, but prior to this launch there has been a gap in specialized video platforms that can gather these videos quickly and make them easy to access. ReliefWeb editors select relevant videos from more than 300 humanitarian sources, organize them, and make them available.

Jobs App

– Job finding can be challenging in the humanitarian system due to short-term appointments, short application deadlines, and fast paced recruitment. However, finding the right people quickly is key to the success of any humanitarian operation. The Jobs App provides access to most available jobs in the humanitarian sector.

– You can create a job search that matches your interests and skills and see when there are new jobs matching your search, i.e. communications officer, jobs in Sudan,
internship, etc.

All the apps allow you to bookmark reports to read later, and importantly, to share their content via social media.

Mobile visitors to ReliefWeb have increased significantly in the last few years, according to Adrian Ciancio, product manager at the digital humanitarian information service. “In 2015, mobile visitors to our site increased by an overwhelming 71%, of which over 90% were new visitors. Although we have a mobile version of the website, we believe that the apps allow us to package, curate, and organize content in ways that better serve the needs of our audience,” Ciancio said.

The team will also be conducting an impact evaluation on all the apps and plans on gathering user feedback in the upcoming months to improve and expand on the apps.

You can download the apps here: http://labs.reliefweb.int/apps

This piece was originally published on The Huffington Post

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This post was originally published in the Huffington Post. Photo courtesy of Trickle Up.

By: Caroline Avakian

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the world’s targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions. The MDGs target date expires this year, and as we collaboratively build out new goals for the next 15 years, it will be critical that nonprofit communicators in the global development sector build on what we’ve learned as well. So it got me thinking about what some of my lessons learned were after almost five years working at Trickle Up — an international organization that empowers people living on less than $1.25 a day to take the first steps out of poverty, providing them with resources to build sustainable livelihoods for a better quality of life. 

Trickle Up is a small but dynamic organization that serves people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Founded in 1979, they have a long history of serving the poorest, a population that until recently had been ignored by governments and even many other poverty alleviation organizations. When I came to work for Trickle Up in 2008, as their Director of Communications, like any communications staffer, I was tasked to expand our message, our audiences and media opportunities.

Looking back on what the greatest returns were for our effort, I’ve made a list of the five communications tactics that helped us grow our communications as well as our organization in the almost five years I worked at Trickle Up.

1. Stay on message and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Whether it was at a conference, at the UN, or one-on-one, when anyone asked about Trickle Up, I was always sure to address that we worked exclusively with the ultra poor — people living on less than $1.25 per day. There was something powerful and memorable about the consistency and repetitiveness of, “Are you working with the ultra poor”, “Is this project also targeting the ultra poor?”, “What can we do to make sure that the ultra poor are represented in this conversation?”, that became key to keeping our beneficiaries in the forefront and made our participation more effective.

2. Twitter can help build communications partnerships that can grow a smaller organization’s voice.

Committing ourselves to tweeting more strategically and targeting influencers, policy makers and mainstream media outlets, helped us raise awareness on global poverty and the ultra poor, and led to media partnerships like one with Huffington Post Impact, that helped bring our message into the mainstream.

3. Flashy websites are great but make sure you’re also educating.

Everyone likes a beautifully designed website but make sure you’re also doing your part to educate your audience on the issues your organization tackles. When I launched Trickle Up’s revamped website in 2010, we had added an “Understanding Poverty” section front and center to make sure it was visible and not just secondary to our own programs. One piece of feedback that we heard consistently was that the website not only looked great but was also deeply informative. Educating people on the nuances of poverty was a main communications goal, and our website served as a resource and reference for many looking for information on people living on less than $1.25 per day.

4. Blogging and content sharing is key to growing your audience.

Once we started growing our blog and sharing our content with other organizations looking to publish similar content, we grew our readership exponentially. Sometimes we made the decision not to publish a blog post on our website blog, but rather on a partner site or media site that publishes interesting global development content. It was always worth the extra effort and introduced our organization to many new audiences and other organizations.

5. Growing your peer network is critical to your success.

Some nonprofit organizations view their peers as competitors and don’t engage them as much as they could. When I came to Trickle Up, I knew that I wanted to expand our communications strategy to more actively engage our peers in our work. There are many ways to do that from a communications standpoint and make it interesting — a blogging series with three different poverty alleviation organizations writing from their viewpoints, a tweetathon, or even just attending each other’s events. You are not only growing your organization but taking your supporters on a more interesting, robust journey that ultimately engages them more effectively.

What’s Next: Expanding our Global Communications Strategy

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are the world’s targets for addressing poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion — while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. It provides a road map for how all countries could collaborate on the future of development and the ending of extreme poverty. That agreement, however, expires this year. As we build out new goals for the next 15 years, it will be critical that the targets benefit all people living in poverty. Equally important is that we ensure that we continue to improve on policies that enable their success and that keep governments accountable.

With that in mind, global development communications will now have an even greater task of engaging audiences in the important work ahead. Just as the MDG’s are sustained through country partnerships and collaboration, the same could be said for strengthening and revitalizing our communications partnerships in organizations of all sizes and budgets, to ensure clarity, unity and power of messaging.

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Target audience: NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, cause and advocacy organizations, educators, general public.

We’re still winding down after a whirlwind day Friday at the United Nations. At the invitation of Amine Lamrabat, Socialbrite sent Shonali Burke and myself to give a presentation on how NGOs (international nonprofits, chiefly) working with the UN can use social media to create impact and advance their causes.

This was one of the most rewarding and invigorating gatherings I’ve attended in quite some time, for both the knowledgeable give and take as well as the astonishing scope of the social good being done by the people in the room. Among those attending were representatives of Mercy International Association, Global Action to Prevent War and Armed Conflict, the Norway Mission to the UN, the American Cancer Society, representations from throughout the UN and many others.

Here’s a Flickr set of 32 photos I snapped. Some of the topics that came up during our talk included:

• How do we scale a campaign to 1 million signatures? Our answer: Set realistic goals. Approach the campaign in phases. Build up a community of support and deputize supporters to participate on your behalf. Learn from past mistakes. Depending on your budget, consider using a large advocacy platform like Care2.

• How should we deal with an autocratic regime? From China to Myanmar to Iran, we’ve seen examples of governments that won’t hesitate to crack down on pro-democracy dissidents. Advocacy groups like Witness have learned a great deal about protecting the identity of pro-democracy activists, so absorb their learnings. (See a Witness official’s guest post on Socialbrite on What are our ethical responsibilities when recording video of people under oppression?) Follow Rebecca MacKinnon on Twitter discussing China and cyber-activism. See the latest Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy. And also see the brilliant work-around Tunisian human rights activists undertook by geotagging stories of human rights abuses around the presidential palace using Google Earth, Google Maps and YouTube.

• Should we launch social media accounts in multiple languages? Readers, what do you think? My advice was to use no more than two languages in the same social stream, but to launch separate accounts in multiple languages when you have both the capacity and market opportunity for it.

• How to improve SEO results? Well, that’s a subject for a return day of training at the UN, I hope.

As always, we welcome follow-up questions and conversations with anyone who attended, or missed, Friday’s session. Email me, email Shonali, or call us at 925-600-7641.

Related

• How NGOs can use social media to combat poverty (Socialbrite)

• Fighting poverty by enhancing social entrepreneurship

• Witness: Putting a face on human rights (Socialbrite)

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Today my Socialbrite partner Shonali Burke and I are giving a presentation to NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) at the United Nations.

Back in November, an invitation flew into our laps from Amine Lamrabat of the Civil Society and Outreach Unit (CSOU), Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD), Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). By gosh, when it comes to acronyms, nobody beats the UN!

The department is focusing in the new year on marshalling resources to combat poverty — quite a challenge, considering up to 80 percent of the world’s 7 billion people live in poverty or near-poverty conditions. (See stats from the World Bank.) So we tailored our presentation to highlight the work of some international nonprofits that are making an impact, especially in the developing world (or Global South, as some call it), including:

• Send a Cow, a UK-based nonprofit that is helping African farmers create a sustainable ecosystem and a process of paying it forward. Farmers who are helped, with training on how to grow crops in harsh climates, agree to pass that knowledge on to other farmers — along with a first-born calf. Send a Cow helps African farmers grow enough food to feed their families, sell their produce, start small businesses and rise out of poverty. They do a nice job with their website, produce high-quality videos and are growing a fan base on Twitter and Facebook, though we couldn’t spot any online fundraising or mobile efforts.

• USA for UNHCR’s Blue Key campaign, which Shonali is overseeing, has built a nice community over the past year, with occasional tweet-a-thons to raise funds, $5 per key, and awareness about the plight of refugees.

• In my view, charity: water has made the most astonishing use of social media and new media, with breathtakingly good videos, multimedia, photography and smart ways to mobilize social networks. Check out the story of charity: water video they did for their 5-year anniversary as well as the new WaterForward campaign. Also, see the video How charity: water changes lives through multimedia and find your charity: water project on a map — I’ve been using on that in my presentations for years.

We’ll also be discussing:

• Epic Change and its annual To Mama With Love campaign

• 1-to-1 micro-giving and micro-fundraising platforms, including Vittana, give2gether, Razoo, Causevox, Kiva (for loans) and DonorsChoose.

• We’re proud that Socialbrite strategist Ken Banks has created a mobile NewsWatch series for National Geographic online, focusing on use of SMS for social and economic good in the developing world. Also see Frontline SMS mobile case studies.

We’ll be tweeting about our UN appearance on our @socialbrite Twitter channel.

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And take part in the first ever #BlueKey Tweetathon today!

At Socialbrite, a lot of people approach us about cause campaigns. But one in particular is especially worth spotlighting this week: the Blue Key campaign, which ends with World Refugee Day next Monday.

Blue Key was brought to our attention by Socialbrite’s own Shonali Burke, who is helping to show USA for UNHCR — the US-based nonprofit that supports the UN Refugee Agency — how social media can help make a real, on-the-ground difference in the lives of people displaced by war, threats of war, ethnic division and other causes.

How you can help

Before we delve too deeply into the refugee crisis, let’s list two simple things you can do to help out.

(1) The first and most important is to order your Blue Key for a mere $5. A blue key will show the 6,000+ staff members of the UN Refugee Agency around the world that we appreciate their work. The key pin or pendant symbolizes our power to help refugees open the door to a new home and a new future.

(2) The second thing you can do is to spread the word about Blue Key, on Facebook or Twitter. Here are a few ready-made tweets!

• Did you know that there are more than 43 million refugees worldwide? Your $5 #bluekey could open a new door for them. http://ow.ly/5d54i
• “Kite Runner” author Khaled Hosseini says anyone can be a refugee. Last week to get your $5 #bluekey! http://ow.ly/5d59P (pls RT!)

If you really want to go the extra mile, you can change your Twitter avatar or Facebook logo to support Blue Key, like Socialbrite has done.

Special events in next week

Tweetathon today
Today, from 9 am to 9 pm ET, several several of the Blue Key Champions (I’m one) will be taking part in a Tweetathon. We’ll be tweeting about the campaign, why we’re supporting it and urging people to get a key (remember, they’re just $5 each!). Just like in a good old-fashioned telethon, we’re going to talk #bluekey throughout the day. Just follow the #bluekey hashtag.

Also today, from 1 to 2 pm ET (10 to 11 am PT), Roya Hosseini, wife of Khaled Hosseini — the best-selling author of “The Kite Runner” and a Blue Key campaign supporter — will be joining the conversation on Twitter. Roya manages the operations of and tweets for the Khaled Hosseini Foundation and will be sharing insights into the refugee crisis and why the Blue Key campaign is so important. Follow @UNRefugeeAgency and @tkhf (the Khaled Hosseini Foundation).

June 20: World Refugee Day Luncheon!
If you’ll be in Washington, DC, next Monday, help recognize the courage, strength and determination of women, men and children who are forced to flee their homes under threat of persecution, conflict and violence. The World Refugee Day Luncheon takes place June 20, 12:30 to 2 pm, at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW, Washington, DC. Keynote speaker: journalist and author Seymour Hersh. Tickets cost $100. Purchase at http://www.worldrefugeeday.us

Harrowing stories of survival — and how we can help

Most of us will never know the feeling of being forced to leave your home, sometimes forcibly, and have to leave everything behind. On the Blue Key blog, Somali refugees Abdullah Omar, 25, and his wife Khadija related their harrowing ordeal on the Libyan border, resulting in their decision to send their one-year-old daughter back to war-ravaged Somalia.

These are real people facing unimaginable circumstances. If you have a child, nephew, niece or cousin, imagine them being separated from their parents or from their homes. There are some pretty startling statistics when it comes to the breadth of the crisis, such as this: there are 17 million refugees and internally displaced children under the age of 18. And this: the average length of displacement in a refugee camp is now a staggering 17 years. (See a 32-page whitepaper on the refugee crisis.)

Please help spread public awareness about the plight of the 43 million of refugees in 128 countries being helped by the UN, and get a blue key for a $5 donation.

If you can’t get and wear your Blue Key for just $5, you can still help:

• Show your support by spreading the word on the social networks. You can share the USA for UNHCR Facebook page (www.facebook.com/unrefugees) and respond to the event invitation on our Facebook page.
• You can tweet about the campaign using the #bluekey hashtag and RSVP to our Twtvite Twitter invitation.
• Donate a tweet a day to USA for UNHCR to help raise awareness on Twitter by signing up at www.justcoz.org/UNRefugeeAgency.
• Swap out your Twitter icon for a week for a Blue Key avatar.

These people need our help.

Related

• UN Flickr photo set on Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (amazing photos!)

• Find a World Refugee Day event near you

• Introducing the Blue Key Champions (from the Blue Key blog)

• Get Your Blue Key In Support of World Refugee Day (By Gini Dietrich)

• A Simple #BlueKey Can Change the Lives of Thousands (Kami Watson Huyse)

• Challenges Beyond Our Own (Kellye Crane)

• The Blue Key Campaign: Cynicism and me (Mark Story)

• Videos by the UN Agency for Refugees

• The book Unlocking a Better World introduces you to first-hand accounts of those who have faced the unimaginable and yet have the resilience to rebuild their lives.

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