By Asha Sharma, Product Lead, Social Good
People come to Crisis Response on Facebook to let friends and family know they’re safe, learn and share more about what’s happening and help communities recover. Community Help was added a year ago to make it easier for people to ask for and give help during a crisis. But people helping people is only part of the solution. Organizations and businesses also play an integral role in responding to crises and helping communities rebuild.
Today we’re announcing that organizations and businesses can post in Community Help, so that they can provide critical information and services for people to get the help they need in a crisis.
We’re beginning to roll out the feature to Pages for organizations and businesses like Direct Relief, Lyft, Chase, Feeding America, International Medical Corps, The California Department of Forestry and Fire and Save the Children and will make the feature available to more in the coming weeks.
Enabling organizations and businesses to post in Community Help will give them a new way to reach communities impacted by crises. For example, they might post about helping people find everything from free transportation to supplies and connecting volunteers with organizations that need help.
Over the past year, people turned to Community Help for more than 500 different crises. Some of the crises where people used Community Help the most in 2017 include the flooding in Brazil (May), Hurricane Harvey in the US (August), the attack in Barcelona (August), the flooding in Mumbai (August) and the earthquake in Central Mexico (September).
People have also engaged with Community Help more than 750,000 times via posts, comments and messages, and the most frequent categories they use are volunteer opportunities, shelter, food and clothing donations.
Our priority is to build tools that help keep people safe and provide them with ways to get the help they need to recover and rebuild after a crisis. We hope this update makes it even easier for people to get the help they need in times of crisis and will give businesses and organizations an opportunity to build stronger communities around them.