When the American Red Cross deployed to Houston after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in late August, it knew a lot of people were in need, and there was a lot of work to be done. The question was: Where to dive in first?
At its second annual Social Good Forum on November 29 in New York, Facebook revealed a new Community Help API that will enable disaster-relief nonprofits like the Red Cross to access public Facebook data, and figure out where to target their aid.
But the idea for the new Community Help API, Gleit says, was really prompted by their partners, specifically the Red Cross and NetHope, which Facebook has approached to be the first organizations to pilot the new API. “They both spoke to that a lot of times, they don’t know where to start, and they expressed to us that they wanted a way to make that easier,” Gleit says. “We have the data, the data is public, and we know who the user in need of help is, where they’re asking for help, what kind of help their asking for, and the specific post in which they’re asking for help,” she adds. For Facebook, it was just a matter of connecting all that data with the organizations that could do something with it.
After a disaster hits, Facebook will generate a single Crisis Response hub that will combine its existing post-crisis features, along with donation opportunities, to streamline post-disaster actions for users. For nonprofits, the Community Help API will act as something of a funnel for all of the data collected through Community Help. The Community Help API will create a dataset for nonprofits, which will be able to see not only how many people are calling for a specific type of aid–food, for instance–but also, because Facebook’s posts are geotagged, where they are posting from.
While NetHope and the Red Cross will be the first to work with this data, Gleit expects it will soon scale up to more disaster-relief organizations. For now, Gleit adds, Facebook will not be sharing the contact information of the users who are posting for help with the nonprofits. “That’s such a sensitive issue,” she says. However, the nonprofits will be able to access the post itself, as well as the comments, where users in need, Gleit says, often post their phone numbers. As the API scales up, though, more contact-information sharing is something she could see Facebook making available.