CorpComms Magazine

It is instructive to view organisations that have taken action on Haiti with this consideration in mind. Transport, communications, healthcare and infrastructure companies obviously had a clear role to play in the relief effort, which may be the reason why many of them felt relaxed about publicising their relief efforts.

'We put details of our giving on our website because actually we're proud of our legacy on corporate giving,' says Kate Gay, head of consumer public relations at British Airways, which mounted the first relief flight by a commercial airline after the earthquake, sending two planes of food, tents and water purification tablets via the Dominican Republic at a cost of £250,000.

The airline also pledged £300,000 from its Unicef 'Change for Good' programme, which collects small change from passengers returning from holidays and business trips.

'It's important to our customers as well as our staff that we do business responsibly,' adds Gay. 'We're not doing it for public relations purposes. We're doing it because we have responsibilities to the regions to which we fly.

'We fly to the Dominican Republic, which is right next to Haiti, and we just felt that if we could do something, we should do it. Responses like this show that we care.'

The bigger picture

A similar approach was taken at pharmaceuticals group Glaxo SmithKline, whose action included giving $1.6 million of antibiotics, $10 million of respiratory and diabetes treatments, toothpaste, pain relief tablets and vitamins plus a £250,000 donation to the British Red Cross to fund water and sanitation works.

Alex Harrison, director of media: global financial and corporate news, says: 'From a communications perspective, we sent out a very brief press release to the US media and posted it on our website because we were getting many requests from the US about how we were responding.

'But it was aimed at keeping the media informed rather than seeking to pro-actively capitalise on the situation.'

Furthermore, she stresses that the action taken was not a knee-jerk reaction to disaster but part of a programme of work through non-profit partners on humanitarian aid such as AmeriCares, Direct Relief International, Health Partners International of Canada, International Medical Assistance, MAP International and Project Hope.

'The fact that we have these ongoing partnerships with these charities shows that this action is very much part of our whole approach on CSR.

'We are obviously a company whose products can help in this kind of situation. We responded to the Asian tsunami and the floods in Philippines last year. We're a significant multinational company and we do respond when disasters like these strike.'

Industry reponse

The theme of in-industry assistance is also demonstrated in the infrastructure sector, where waste management group Veolia Environmental sent to Haiti 20 tonnes of emergency equipment that can supply people with drinking water and distributed 30 tonnes of other equipment to aid agencies.

In construction, the Home Builders Federation called on its members to donate to Habitat for Humanity, a charity specialising in building shelters and reconstruction assistance.

In media, BSkyB worked with the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella organisation for 13 humanitarian aid agencies, to launch a rapid response 'Red Button Appeal' whereby Sky viewers could donate from their armchairs, raising £93,000 in the three weeks following the disaster.

Food companies also got involved, with Nestlé providing $150,000 of food plus $1 million of bottled water, PepsiCo giving Quaker food products, Gatorade drinks and $1 million of water and Unilever donating $500,000 plus soap and water purifiers.

In communications, BT Group hosted the DEC's online platform for donations and provided telephone and network management support for the organisation's appeal, processing more than 370,000 donations and taking more than £19 million.

At Vodafone, Andrew Dunnett, director of the Vodafone Foundation, says the telecoms company worked with charity Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) to provide people in Haiti with three minutes of free call time on satellite telephones, allowing them to call family and friends to let them know they were safe.

He says the Haiti disaster also saw a surge in giving-by-text messages, with people donating a pre-prescribed amount to the DEC by sending a text message, with the amount later added to their next mobile phone bill.

Transcending boundaries

On a wider basis, Vodafone contributes about £400,000 a year to TSF and has pledged £10 million over five years to the United Nations' World Food programme, of which one-third goes to disaster relief. The 24 country foundations that make up the Vodafone Foundation also contributed £277,000 in cash to Haiti relief.

While Vodafone has long had a tradition of responding to disasters that occur in countries where it operates, it doesn't have direct operations in Haiti. Dunnett adds: 'This is a global problem and a disaster like this transcends boundaries. For us as a company, we just see this as part of our global responsibility.

'We put it on the website so our investors and customers could see it but it's not something we would proactively seek coverage for.'

Similar attitudes among major companies mean that a corporate response to disasters and other aid programmes is increasingly viewed as business as normal and not-for-profit relief organisations are forming corporate partnerships.

The Red Cross, for example, has such partnerships with companies including GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Barclays, Brit Insurance, BT Group, Canon Europe, Epson, John Lewis Partnership, Land Rover and Tesco.

One of the tools of such partnership is 'cause-related marketing,' whereby in-store, on-pack or trade promotions are mounted for mutual benefit in the form of increased sales, press and PR coverage, and increased long-term customer loyalty.

Indeed, the Red Cross features in the top ten of 180 potential partners most likely to influence a purchase compiled by charity publication Third Sector.

Save The Children, another charity operator of corporate partnerships, reported company donations of $1.25 million in the first two days after the Haiti disaster.

Such ventures demonstrate what Welsh at Ethical Corporation believes is an increasingly close connection between companies and economic change that will benefit crisis-torn communities like Haiti.

Rather than be embarrassed about the aid activity they are undertaking, he believes that businesses should be openly targeting opportunities in such situations, since it is the infrastructure and jobs that new factories and distribution centres can provide that will help countries like Haiti rebuild after the immediate disaster is over.

Businesses are often better resourced, closer to the action and more able to help than governments and other organisations, he points out. But the key is that such efforts are a natural extension of their capabilities and existing supply chains.

'We're increasingly seeing more ethical sourcing by companies such as Walmart, Timberland and Tesco, which have extensive supply chains around the world and see themselves as part of the solution, not the problem,' he adds.

Indeed, Hurricane Katrina is credited with bringing about important changes in Walmart's sustainability strategy.

Some commentators believe such activity could presage even greater involvement in social action by business.

Moving forward

Following the Haiti earthquake, Joseph Lazzaro, financial editor of internet website Dailyfinance.com, argued that rebuilding the nation's economy would require a 'mini Marshall Plan, à la Europe post World War II' but this time with a large corporate presence.

He envisages a five-year rebuilding plan that would require the help of between 20,000 to 50,000 skilled professionals and craftsmen to train Haitians and could cost as much as $20 billion, funded by large corporations as well as the World Bank, the European Union and national governments.

Sounds far-fetched? Probably. Yet, business has a rich history of solving social ills within national boundaries, demonstrated, for example, by the achievements in Victorian times of Cadbury and Lever Brothers.

If the 21st Century equivalent is to be a global response, companies and charities need to ensure that communications becomes a fully functioning part of the process, rather than an afterthought. For example, out of the 40 international staff that Christian relief organisation World Vision sent to complement its 800 staff in Haiti after the earthquake happened, four were communications people.

Was this a waste of money, a distraction or even an exploitation of the PR opportunities? None of the above, says communications officer Tennille Bergin.

'From a communications point of view, there are two audiences for what we're doing in Haiti,' she says. 'There are people in the UK who want to know what's going on but also people engaged on the ground in Haiti that we need to communicate with. Sometimes, in the rush to send people and aid, that can be forgotten.'

Tracking social media

Social media became a major source of information and fundraising activities following the 13 January earthquake, with 2.3 million tweets including the word 'Haiti' or 'Red Cross' between 12 and 14 January.

But 59 per cent were re-tweets, and the majority of these focussed ona campaign to use text messaging to raise funds for the Red Cross.

Such was the power of this Twitter activity that the Red Cross raised more than $8 million within three days from text message pledges, whereby donors pressed five numbers to donate $10 to the charity.

By contrast, the Red Cross received just $190,000 in 2009 from text message donations. One week after the Haitian earthquake, the Red Cross had raised $112 million.

Haitian born musician, Wyclef Jean, asked his 1.4 million Twitter followers to donate to his foundation using text messages and reportedly raised $2 million. Many tweets linked to news website MSNBC, which created a list of organisations that were providing aid and encouraged donations.

Mainstream media took advantage of information in social media. For example, CNN.com monitored tweets from Haiti and created a special page to display some of the more notable ones, while the Wall Street Journal offered a slide show of pictures of the devastation taken by affected people.

Just over four out of ten (43 per cent) of all news links in blogs during the week of 11 to 15 January related to the tragedy in Haiti, but on the two days after the earthquake this spiked to 82 per cent. By contrast, just 15 per cent of Tweets on Haiti contained news links (although this figure more than doubled to 36 per cent on the day of the earthquake).

The situation reversed during the following week. More than half - 58 per cent - of all news links on Twitter related to Haiti, which was twice as many as the number of links relating to the next four most popular subjects on the microsite. However, just eight per cent of the news links to blogs related to Haiti.

Source: Pew Hispanic Centre

Tweak the tweet

A social media project that last year won second prize in a competition focussed on improving communications during disasters has been used to help relief workers in Haiti.

Tweak the Tweet, which was developed by University of Colorado student Kate Starbird, uses Twitter to facilitate communications between the emergency services and members of the public.

Starbird says: 'The idea requires no technology whatsoever. A person just has to slightly alter how they're putting down their message in terms of the language they are using. By formatting the information a little differently, it helps automate the processing and aggregation of those messages.'

All tweets begin with the main tag #haiti, and hashtags are then used to highlight critical information, which can then be more easily extracted and collated more easily by computers.

For example, a tweet before tweaking might read, Roads from PAP to les Cayes are open migration from PAP to rural areas has begun. After tweaking, it would read, #haiti #open roads from #loc PAP to les Cayes are open #info migration from PAP to rural area has begun. This tells the computer the road, the fact that it is open, its location and additional information on migration.

In the earthquake's aftermath, students from Colorado University and volunteers across America worked to develop and diffuse the syntax across the Twitter community.

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