How Facebook is Trying to Help Others in a Crisis

When a disaster strikes, people begin to panic about the safety of their loved ones or wonder how they can contribute to the effort to rebuild. For many of these people, Facebook isn’t exactly the first place they would go to check---but, it should be. Facebook’s Crisis Response Center was unveiled in September 2017 and includes safety checks, fundraising, outreach, and informational links all in one place. As time is a major factor in any kind of disaster, this kind of efficiency can revolutionize the way we treat crisis management.

The influence of Facebook is also a huge element. With allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 United States presidential election, Facebook proved it could be a tool to access and impact global affairs. Mark Zuckerberg, founder, and CEO of Facebook hope that it will prove to be a tool for positive change in the world. That is why the Facebook team has been developing tools like the Crisis Response Center to sway that influence in the right direction and it allows the users to be in charge.

An Overview of Facebook’s Crisis Response Tool

The center is multifaceted to address the major concerns of the public when it comes to disasters. By grouping several tools together in one place, Facebook can help to eliminate the inevitable confusion surrounding the disaster itself and streamline the process of finding the necessary help for the victims. The center consists of the following tools:

Safety Check: Using the safety check feature, a victim can let all of their friends and family know they are safe, with a click of a button.

Fundraisers: With this tool, users can quickly locate the charity they’d like to donate to and have the donations come through within seconds.

Community Center: This feature allows users to interact where victims and volunteers can find each other for help.

Links to Articles and Posts: Any articles and posts about the disaster will be looped together using an algorithm based on keywords and phrases, so the public is able to find out the information faster.

The center will be easy to access for all Facebook users as it will be right on their homepage. The safety check will become an optional prompt for anyone signing into their account within the set parameters of the affected zone, so victims can quickly alert their friends and family. The other aspects of the center will work in conjunction with one another to educate the public on disaster and direct them to the appropriate fundraisers or volunteer opportunities.

Giving the Power to Individual People

Facebook aims to take away the more daunting elements of disaster relief by allowing individual users to coordinate their own disaster relief efforts. Of course, organized disaster relief still has a prominent place as the links for the fundraisers are to these organizations, but here people can apply their efforts where they see most fitting. Instead of donating money or supplies to organizations where they don’t necessarily know how their donations are being applied, people can find victims and give to them directly. It also allows users to gather groups of volunteers to aid in direct relief efforts.

It also gives victims a voice. Prior to the Crisis Response Center, the safety check feature just allowed victims to be able to mark themselves safe. This gave people the ability to let all of their friends and families know that they were physically safe all at once, saving the burden on them at such a sensitive time. The tool has expanded into allowing victims to give first-person accounts of their experiences, something both informative to the public and cathartic to the victim. This can also help with fundraising as it gives the disaster a more human element and better appeal to the sympathy of the public.

The Center of Its Community-Geared Mission

Facebook might have started humbly as a place for selfies and statuses, but it has come a long way since then. Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits Facebook is no longer just a place to share information and pictures or reconnect with friends from your past. With nearly a quarter of the world’s population can now be accessed through a Facebook account, Facebook is helping to create a new, fast-growing global culture and reinvent the idea that community is border dependent. In fact, "To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," is their newest mission statement.

The Crisis Response Center can bring this global community together for the greater good. Locality will no longer have to be a barrier to aid. Seeing the faces and reading the testimonials of victims might implore users to aid in efforts when they might have previously felt more apathetic. Language is not even a barrier as Facebook has a tool to automatically translate posts into the user’s preferred language. Facebook is giving their community every chance to connect with one another to be a force for positivity in the world.

The Crisis Response Center is creating something unprecedented. Enabling over 2 billion people to provide aid within seconds could lead to a major rehaul in the way we view disaster relief, in general. Large organizations and expensive advertisements are no longer the best ways to reach the public and implore them into donations. While Facebook might have contributed heavily to the world becoming more global, it has also allowed for more individual emphasis.

Having given people nearly unlimited access to one another for over a decade now, Facebook has created its digital community globally with like-minded users. The opportunities within this community are also unlimited and while local and national affairs still currently dominate over international ones to the average person, this may soon no longer be the case. Facebook is leading the way with this global agenda and the Crisis Response Center is likely one of the first of many tools to usher their community forward.