As more people become connected around the world, we’ll see a proliferation of potential donors and activists ready to contribute to the next high-profile crisis. With real-time information about conflicts and disasters around the world increasingly accessible and available, spread evenly across different platforms in different languages, a crisis in one country can reverberate across the world instantly. Not everyone receiving the news will be spurred to action, but enough people will so that the scale of participation will rise dramatically.
Examining the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake once again will give a good indication of what the future holds. The level of destruction near the capital in Haiti, a densely populated and immensely poor country, was overwhelming: homes, hospitals and institutional buildings collapsed; transportation and communications systems were devastated; hundreds of thousands were killed and 1.5 million more made homeless.4 Within hours, neighboring governments sent in emergency-services teams, and within days many countries around the world had pledged or already delivered aid.
The response from the humanitarian community was even more robust. Within days of the earthquake, the Red Cross had raised more than $5 million through an innovative “text to donate” campaign in which mobile users could text “HAITI” to a special short code (90999) to donate $10, automatically charged to their phone bill. In all, some $43 million in aid passed through mobile donation platforms, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, which builds the technical infrastructure many NGOs used. Télécoms Sans Frontières, a humanitarian organization that specializes in emergency telecommunications, deployed on the ground in Haiti one day after the earthquake to establish call centers to allow families to reach loved ones. And just five days after the earthquake, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s AlertNet humanitarian news service set up the Emergency Information Service, the first of its kind, which allowed Haitians free SMS alert messages to help them navigate the disaster’s impact.
Emergency relief efforts turned into longer-term reconstruction projects, and within months there were tens of thousands of NGOs working on the ground in Haiti. It’s hard to imagine tens of thousands of aid organizations working efficiently—with clear objectives and without redundancy—in any one place, let alone a country as small, crowded and devastated as Haiti. As the months dragged on, unsettling reports about inefficient aid distribution began to surface. Warehouses were full of unused pharmaceuticals left to expire because of poor management. Cholera outbreaks in the sprawling informal settlements threatened to wipe out many of the earthquake survivors. The delivery of funding from institutional donors, mostly governments, was delayed and difficult to keep track of; very little of the funding ever reached the Haitians themselves, having been utilized instead by any number of foreign organizations higher up on the chain. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians were still in unsanitary tent cities a year after the earthquake, because the government and its NGO partners had not yet found a way to otherwise house them. For all the coverage, the fund-raising, the coordination plans and the good intentions, Haitians were not well served in the post-earthquake environment.
People well qualified to say what transpired in Haiti have examined this fallout with great acumen—including Paul Farmer in his book Haiti After the Earthquake—and the consensus seems to be that this was an unfortunate confluence of factors: extensive devastation meeting bureaucratic inefficiency amid a backdrop of deeply entrenched preexisting challenges. Communication technologies could not have hoped to ameliorate all of Haiti’s woes, but there are many areas where, if correctly and widely utilized, coordinated online platforms can streamline this process so that a future version of the Haitian earthquake will produce more good results and less waste in a faster recovery period. Throughout this section we will present a few of our own ideas, knowing full well that the institutional actors in reconstruction settings—the large NGOs, the foreign government donors and all the rest—may be unwilling to take these steps for fear of failure or loss of influence in the future.
As we look ahead to the next wave of disasters and conflicts that will occur in a more connected age, we can see a pattern emerging. The mixture of more potential donors and impressive online marketing will create an “NGO bubble” within each postcrisis society, and eventually that bubble will burst, ultimately leading to a greater decentralization of aid and a rash of new experiments.
Historically, what has differentiated established aid organizations is less their impact than their brand: catchy logos, poignant advertisements and prominent endorsements go much further toward attracting public donations than detailed reports about logistics, antimalarial bed nets or incremental successes. There is perhaps no better recent example of this than the now infamous Kony 2012 video, produced by the nonprofit organization Invisible Children to generate awareness about a multi-decade-long war in northern Uganda. While the NGO’s mission to end atrocities by a Ugandan militant group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was noble, many who were intimately familiar with the conflict—including many Ugandans—found the video misleading, simplistic and, ultimately, self-serving. Yet the video amassed more than 100 million views in under a week (making it the first viral video to do so), largely thanks to endorsements from prominent celebrities with millions of followers on Twitter. Early criticism of the NGO and its operations—like its 70 percent overhead in “production costs” (basically, salaries)—did little to stem the swelling movement, until it was abruptly ended by a very public and bizarre detention of one of the organization’s cofounders after he exposed himself in public.
As we have already said, we will see a more level playing field for marketing in the digital era. Anyone with a registered NGO or charity (and perhaps not even that) can produce a flashy online platform with high-quality content and cool mobile apps. After all, this is the fastest and easiest way for an individual or group to make its mark. The actual substance of the organization—how robust or competent it is, how it handles finances, how good its programs might or might not be—matters less. Like certain start-up revolutionaries who value style over substance, new participants will find ways to exploit the blind spots of their supporters; in this case, these groups can take advantage of the fact that donors have little real sense of what it’s like on the ground. So when a disaster strikes and NGOs pour into the space, the established ones will find themselves shoulder to shoulder with NGO start-ups, groups that have a strong online presence and starter funds but that are generally untested. Such start-ups will be more targeted in their mission than traditional aid organizations, and they’ll appear equally if not more competent than their established counterparts. They’ll attract attention but they’ll deliver less of what is needed by those they are trying to help; some might be capable but most won’t be, as they will lack the networks, the deep knowledge and the operational skills of professional organizations.
This mismatch between the start-ups’ marketing and delivery will infuriate the established players. Start-ups and institutional NGOs will compete for the same resources, and the start-ups will use their digital savvy and knowledge of different online audiences to their advantage to siphon off resources from the older organizations. They’ll depict the large institutional actors as lumbering, inefficient and out of touch, with high overheads, large staffs and impersonal qualities, promising instead to bring donors much closer to the recipients of aid by cutting out the middlemen. For new potential donors looking to contribute, this promise of directness will be a particularly attractive selling point since connectivity ensures that many of them will feel personally involved in the crisis already.