Pangea Foundation Spotlight: Disaster Relief Communications Hub

Earlier this year, we hosted the first Microsoft-TechSoup Show Your Impact Story Contest and I wandted to take a moment to highlight one of the winners. Elliot blogged about another one of the winners last week. As you may have noticed, we've been writing tooklits and guides, conducting webinars, and blogging about different ways to plan and prepare for disasters and emergencies over the past couple of weeks.

This is, in part, because September is National Preparedness Month. It's also in part because it's around this time of year that the news is full of warnings about hurricanes and wildfires and we want to do our part to make sure that nonprofits and libaries have resources especially for them.

Despite the fear that talking about a major natural disaster might evoke, the resources we've been developing and sharing are really intended to help ensure that your organization can be resilient and flexible — able to adapt to any situation quickly, whether it's an emergency or an opportunity.

One such resource, is a project of the Pangea Foundation, one of the winners of that contest I mentioned earlier. They developed something called ReliefPoint, "a real-time communications hub for national disaster relief coordination and information dissemination." They initially created it in response to the October 2007 wildfires that destroyed land and homes in and around San Diego.

Initially, the region relied on all-centers in order to communicate that status of the fires to various agencies, news affiliates, and community members, but they found it to still take too long to get the information turned around. As an alternative, Pangea created (in 3 days) a hub that provided:

• Instant online access to information from anywhere.
• An information input system that allowed authorities talking to people in the field to immediately share that widely
• Call centers had access to real-time information to respond to callers, media, and agencies responding

Since the original creation in 2007, they've further developed the software into a more robust platform which has been deployed to coordinate relief efforts for the:

• 2008 Midwestern floods
• Hurricane Gustav
• Hurricane Ike
• 2009 Santa Barbara fires
• Tracking of H1N1 influenza

This is just one example of a great tool that can help keep communities safe, and help nonprofits and libraries maintain continuity of their services, even in less-than-ideal circumstances. Check them out, along with the other resources we've been sharing and will continue to post over the next couple of weeks.