I’ve been quiet for a few days, working on a number of projects. Let’s just say that it stands to be a busy summer.
I might as well unveil the curtain on a project I’ve now ushered into public use.
It’s a custom-branded RSS reader, which comes pre-loaded with links to our local Community Alert pages for the American Red Cross in Birmingham and the local EMA.
Since the vast majority of internet users know how about aggregators or how to manually add feeds, this installer package has a great potential for our Red Cross chapter. In fact, the whole thing is designed to be seamless enough that the average user might still not understand what RSS is.
We’ve rolled it out locally, and I am tracking the number of downloads through various venues. It’s primarily targeted for the media, and will be a great asset the next time we have a huge disaster response. But since all of the information is public, we’re also pushing it to local municipalities, our board, and anyone else who has a vested interest in knowing about pending emergencies.
In order to make this work, we had to find the right piece of software — and being a non-profit, we had to make it affordable. Our RSS reader had to have some key features:
- Free to use and distribute
- Included a “pop-up†notification
- Customizable with our logo and branding
- Adware and spyware free
- Short refresh cycle
We were lucky to find just such a program, called Newsplorer. The developer was very kind to set us up with some technical assistance and a customized installer package.
That pop-up notifier was so critical. In a newsroom environment, you can’t expect people to manually refresh their feedlist (assuming they had one.) Otherwise, you could just ask them to manually refresh the old-fashioned newsroom page. With the system-tray pop, and an option to check the feed every minute, we now had a system capable of generating dozens of alerts per day, if events and emergencies warrant it.
Download it and give it a whirl. If you don’t see anything for awhile, that means that nothing bad is happening!
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This is great. Will you be reaching out to other chapters around the country to see if they can apply this idea? Make your first stop in my neck of the woods, please.
Comment by Andrea Weckerle — April 4, 2006 @ 7:02 pm
I’ve got two of the eight regional offices booking me for presentations to their chapter communicators, and NHQ is looking at this as well.
I’ve spoken in the past with someone at your local chapter — we’ll see what we can do.
Please e-mail me with any feedback you might have about the system.
Comment by Ike — April 4, 2006 @ 9:36 pm
What kind of feedback are your getting from your constituents on this? Thanks, Dave.
Comment by Dave Tinker — April 6, 2006 @ 11:21 am
Gulf Shores Alabama
We need a version customized for the Alabama Gulf Coast also. Can we modify it for this area and use it?
Ted Bailes
Gulf Shores, AL
Comment by Ted Bailes — April 6, 2006 @ 11:57 am
How about talking to other NGOs about this project. I’m sure some would be very interested.
Comment by gillo — April 10, 2006 @ 6:31 am
Gillo, the word is out, and there is nothing proprietary about what I’ve put together.
There is absolutely no reason why NGOs and NPOs can’t take advantage of these technologies. I’m going to be very careful about who I “invite” into our project, however, and I’m happy to explain why.
In a disaster situation, we’ll be funneling new updates every few minutes if necessary. The RSS reader we use is specially tweaked to check for new headlines every minute. If we load it up with newsfeeds for agencies not involved in immediate response, we run the risk of fatigue for the end user.
Simply put, if a channel designed for emergency information starts getting clogged with non-emergency stuff, the media and our intended audience will disable it, and it becomes useless.
Now, I do hope this opens the whole universe of news media to wider use of RSS. Right now it’s pretty much limited to technology writers and journalists. There’s no reason they couldn’t use one RSS aggregator for most news releases and content management, and leave our system dedicated to emergency messaging.
Comment by Ike — April 10, 2006 @ 6:51 am