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Almost three years ago, Trilateral Research and the Global Disaster Preparedness Centre began their journey together to investigate the value and use of social media analysis tools for preparedness and disaster risk reduction purposes. That initial study demonstrated that there was indeed a desire on behalf of many Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies (RCRC) to engage with social media analysis tools, yet they faced both internal barriers as well as technological barriers in optimising existing tools to meet their needs.

Such barriers ranged from lack of resources and skills, to the tools being overly complex, expensive and unable to function fully on limited bandwidth. In response, Trilateral Research and the Global Disaster Preparedness Centre sought to extend the study to gathering user requirements from representatives working with social media across National Societies in order to ascertain what functionalities would be of use and complementary to their ongoing efforts. Such efforts resulted in the present, PREP1, being supported.

Gathering User Requirements

As this blog charts, researchers from Trilateral Research, representatives from the Global Disaster Preparedness Centre, and representatives from across the RCRC network, have worked together to develop an understanding of how/when social media is used, and, accordingly what features ought to be included in a future tool. Take a look at our previous post here.

Raising Awareness

To share our findings further afield, Trilateral Research are involved in multiple dissemination and communication activities:

  • Blog Post – Crisis Response JournalFacilitating two-way public communication in crisis and disaster management
  • Policy Paper – 7th International Conference on Building Resilience – Thailand. The conference sought to bridge the gap between the research community in disaster risk reduction, and policy and practice. Experts from all geographical regions – though mostly the pacific south east — shared state of the art research on resilience being conducted by Universities and research institutes. The conference series was initiated by The Global Disaster Resilience Centre (GDRC). Paper themes revolved around: Understanding disaster risk; Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk; Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience; Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction. Within these issues, contributions focused on: Accountability, Multi-stakeholder approach, inclusion and empowerment of stakeholders, Land use and urban planning, Ecosystems-based disaster risk reduction, National and local platforms for DRR, Health systems and DRR, Finance, Insurance and risk transfer, Standards, Social protection, Cultural heritage, Tourism. The overall aim was to encourage multi-national and cross-cutting discussions, to better research on resilience by sharing across traditional boundaries of work. The paper set the scene to start with, opening on the problem that across the Red Cross Red Crescent network, National Societies want to adopt the use of social media for preparedness and disaster risk reduction purposes but want to do it in a way that offers them insight into the effectiveness of their communication. Trilateral’s part was to look into what it means to build an analytics tool (along with supporting training materials) to support their use of social media for preparedness. Trilateral did so by blending the insights from the social sciences with the tools from data analytics to better understand the needs of and support the practices within humanitarian agencies. Idea behind this is that with improved use of social media, National Societies can play an instrumental role in supporting communities to be better prepared and aware of potential risks. Methods were then explained in very quick detail, enough to explain to the audience where the data came from. The first step involved identifying and validating user requirements from which to develop an initial design and functionality of an open access social media analysis tool (SMAT). The remainder (and majority) of the talk focused on the user requirements and related potential solutions identified (in the very broad send, not in terms of our specific prototype) as well as important related questions about what SMAT should support for each of the 4 main areas of concern identified: brand management, environmental scanning, sharing information, resource mobilisation. A copy of the paper can be found here
  • Social media advertising via the @Trilateral_UK twitter account.

Lastly, we are in the process of finalising a Journal article to summarise the core findings of the study in an open access journal.

Next Steps

Those involved in the study are committed to realising the true potential of PREP1. As time progresses, data scientists and researchers at Trilateral Research have begun the necessary steps to begin to build PREP1. They will now look to gathering additional funds, to continue to build, test and roll-out the tool to National Societies.

If you are interested in finding out more about our efforts, please contact the project manager – Dr. Hayley Watson – Practice Manager at Trilateral Research: hayley.watson@trilateralresearch.com

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