Facebook has announced some changes the company is bringing to its Community Help features will allow businesses and other organizations to take part in efforts to address crises. As shown in the accompanying infographic, Community Help and Crisis Response have played pivotal roles in helping the platform’s users to stay safe and to keep in touch with loved ones when a crisis strikes. In fact, there have been 750 thousand Community Help posts from across more than 500 separate crises since the tool was introduced last year. The most common theme of those posts has been as it pertains to volunteer opportunities, shelter, food and clothing donations. However, until now, larger entities have mostly been excluded from the interactions despite that they can actually represent some of the most useful resources in emergency situations. Moreover, they are a major part of any rebuilding or rescue efforts that take place following a disaster.
As is often the case with new rollouts of features, the world’s largest social media platform is starting out small. For now, the feature will only be hitting Pages for organizations and businesses such as Direct Relief, Lyft, Chase, Feeding America, International Medical Corps, The California Department of Forestry and Fire, and Save the Children. With that said, businesses and organizations that haven’t been included yet should probably not be overly concerned. These kinds of implementations tend to take some time to hit everybody and Facebook says it will continue adding Pages over the coming weeks. According to Facebook, its priority is to build out tools that will help in keeping communities and people safe with the assistance of local and international aid – as well as helping people to recover when an emergency does affect them. So it’s unlikely that many, if any, of the platforms business and organization Pages are going to be left out.
Meanwhile, the news of this new initiative probably couldn’t come at a better time for the company. The tech company has not been making the best headlines in the news over the past several months. This kind of effort, taking into consideration that it appears almost entirely humanitarian, is likely to be a bolster for employee morale and for the general public opinion of the company. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either, since efforts like these could effectively save countless lives.
