With over two billion users on its platform, people come to Crisis Response on Facebook to let friends and family know they are safe. Starting today, Facebook is making easier for organisations and businesses to provide critical information and services for people to get the help they need in a crisis by allowing them to post in Community Help.
Community Help was last ago to make it easier for people to ask for and give help during a crisis. But, Facebook believes people helping people is only part of the solution. Organisations and businesses also play an integral role in responding to crises and helping communities rebuild. The new feature is rolling out to Pages for organisations 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 organisations 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),” the company said in a blog post.
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.
“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 organisations an opportunity to build stronger communities around them,” added Facebook.