In Conclusion: Alternative Avenues

In addition to the traditional social media channels we’ve described below, there were others that we posted to in the hopes that we could drive just “that much” extra traffic.

Scribd.com

                Scribd is a document sharing website that allows for both commenting, social sharing and self-publication for sale of personal works. On the site you are able to label the category of your document, “Research”, as well as tag it for discovery. Our team chose to not only post our poster, but also our description in order to fill in the requirement that the piece be a document. While we did get 35 reads, and a number of click-throughs, but again it didn’t lead to any submissions. In the future, we would most likely add something more robust to give the impression that our research was more extensive and examine the best use cases for Scribd to ensure we’re using effective categories and tags.

Various Blogs

                Our team found a number of valuable blogs on which we tried to post, but were unable without prior permission. For example, the Red Cross blog/forum would’ve been an ideal place to solicit advice, however, they are the only ones approved to do so. With more time, we would’ve attempted to reach out to Red Cross ahead of time with a blog request and worked directly with them to be posted. This would’ve attracted passionate individuals and those with experience in disaster relief. There were other opportunities such as this that we didn’t spend enough time researching and therefore their success was minor even if we were allowed/able to submit posts.

Yahoo! Groups

                Yahoo! Groups at the beginning was VERY exciting for us. Not only did we believe that we could easily post to these pages, but that the individuals had opted-in to receive and comment on information related to disasters. In our Advocacy class we learn that statistics and change are more effective to those who are highly involved and have personal experience with the topic. The problem we ran into with these groups was two-fold, first, only some of them were open and the others required approval to join the group. This took time and we didn’t have any! Second, some of the groups hadn’t been posted to in a couple of years, and in one case, four years. All we could assume is that the group was developed after a specific disaster and faded over time, meaning the members are no longer highly involved. I don’t know that we wouldn’t post to these going forward, but only with enough time to ensure we were successful through other channels.

Yahoo groups - Disaster Survivors (64 members)

Yahoo Groups - California Disasters (1,400)

Yahoo Groups - Disaster Communicator’s Forum  (419)

Yahoo Groups - Disaster Watch (329)

SUDDEN Response Yahoo Groups (452)

We’d love to gather your thoughts on other forums we could’ve utilized!