Giving Compass' Take:

• Devex explores the role that data and social media platforms can play in assisting humanitarian aid efforts through the International Committee of the Red Cross' new pilot programs.

• As the world becomes better connected online, development organizations need to adapt to emerging technologies and integrate social media more organically into their strategies. This is just one step.

• For more information and technology trends in the sector, be sure to check out this article.

Earlier this year, Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, noted that “big data and better contextual analysis have the potential to transform how the ICRC responds to and anticipates humanitarian crises.”

He was not merely speculating. For the last three years, ICRC has been developing a digital system to analyze mountains of data gathered from messages posted on Twitter and local social media platforms, especially in fragile corners of the world.

The initiative, in collaboration with the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, or EPLF, a leading Swiss engineering university, aims to give the Red Cross a new tool for early detection and a better understanding of emerging humanitarian issues. It has already carried out three pilot programs and will be running 11 more this year.

Charlotte Lindsey-Curtet, ICRC’s director of communication and information management and lead on the project, said the pilots have shown that the new system works, but much work remains to make it more effective, and to integrate it into ICRC’s operations and training.

"Almost three years ago, we initiated a project to try to better understand the environments we operate in, without any idea whether it would be feasible," Lindsey-Curtet told Devex. "Many people were very skeptical. Our input, for nearly nine months at the beginning, was to start to aggregate all of the terms that would be interesting for us in various languages. We’re looking at such terms as 'war,' 'bomb,' 'terrorist,' 'attack,' 'conflict,' 'hospital,' 'shelter.' We had to find local terms for all these things. For example, would local people use the word 'humanitarian,' or 'charity,' or 'alms?'"

Read the full article about how social media can assist humanitarian aid by Burton Bollag at Devex International Development.