According to the basics of crisis communications theory, disaster relief organizations should always speak with “one voice.” As demonstrated through recent events such as the Los Angeles wildfires, information these organizations provide through social media can be vital to saving lives and protecting property.
But while this approach usually is true during the initial stages of a disaster, new research finds that messaging can be more effective when relief organizations reach out with information that is tailored for different social media audiences later in the recovery process.
At that point, learning where to go for relief and to reconnect with loved ones is crucial for some, while for others obtaining information about how to provide financial support, such as through online donations, is more helpful.
Two professors at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business – Eunae Yoo and Lu (Lucy) Yan — joined colleagues from the University of Notre Dame and McGill University in Canada in studying the effectiveness of disaster responses using Twitter data from the Canadian Red Cross.
In their research, they found a nearly 30% increase in social media engagement when different audiences were targeted in separate accounts after conditions became less uncertain.
Disaster relief organizations — such as national societies in the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies — often maintain several accounts to represent unique operational entities, such as their national headquarters and regional, state and local branches.
They found that convergence across a disaster relief organization’s social media accounts does not always lead to the best outcome.
“Engagement is 4.3% higher with a match of content creation decisions during the response phase rather than a mismatch,” Yoo and Yan and their co-authors wrote. “We provide strong evidence for engagement increasing when accounts with the same DRO produce convergent content in the response phase. On the other hand, a mismatch of content creation decisions is 29.6% more effective for engagement during the recovery phase.”
Their paper, “Speak with One Voice? Examining Content Coordination and Social Media Engagement During Disasters,” was published last year in the journal Information Systems Research. Other authors are Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez, a former Kelley faculty member who is now the Greg and Patty Fox Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations at Notre Dame, and Changseung (Chang) Yoo, an assistant professor, Desautels Faculty of Management, at McGill.
In the paper, the researchers cite as an example two tweets posted by the Canadian Red Cross on Twitter (now X) after the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Canada. One tweet provided instructions to disaster victims on how to register for aid and the other contained a link to make an online donation.
As a result, the tweets garnered about 280,000 engagements – including retweets and likes – and resulted in more than 36,000 donations that represented about 60% of total donations from all social media platforms made the CRC’s response and 70% of total value.
Overall, they analyzed 934 tweets from the CRC’s headquarters account, which received 33,861 retweets and 34,722 likes. They also looked at 629 tweets from the CRC’s Alberta provincial account, which received 4,802 retweets and 2,862 likes. They measured engagement as the total number of likes, retweets, clicks and replies and used text analysis to identify whether the audience were victims or supporters. They analyzed how audience match between accounts affected user engagement.
The paper provides new direction on how national and local accounts of relief organizations should coordinate their social media content.
“We find that a match of content creation decisions during the response phase is more effective at increasing engagement for local accounts rather than national accounts,” said Yoo, assistant professor of operations and decision technologies and a Grant Thornton Scholar, and Yan, the John & Esther Reese Professor of operations and decision technologies. “Local accounts should follow the lead of national accounts regarding the supply of information in the response phase.”
The authors acknowledge limitations in their research, since it is based on a study of catastrophic wildfires, which occur suddenly, while other types of disasters – such as strong storms — take more time to develop and thus involve an emergency preparedness phase. Another aspect for future study is coordinating a disaster relief organization’s accounts during a long-term recovery.
The paper has received considerable notice in disaster relief practitioners and humanitarian, including in articles published by disaster management platforms where best practices for disaster mitigation, preparation, response and recovery are discussed.