DOOHgood: Help the US tornado victims by running Red Cross spots

May 24, 2011 by Dave Haynes

The mind-boggling visuals that have rolled in from Joplin, Missouri in the aftermath of Sunday’s EF-5 tornado hit was enough to get DOOHgood into action a little earlier than planned.

We wondered about it after the tornadoes in Alabama, but this event – which has taken at least 116 lives – reinforced the need to help.

The DOOHgood all-volunteer organization is still getting itself organized, but we have turned on the website and uploaded – ready for downloading and use by Digital OOH networks – a 30 second spot produced by the American Red Cross to help tornado victim around the US, using several donor methods.

The spot has audio and we would LOVE to see a company take some of the B-roll available on the Red Cross site, follow the donor formula, and produce a separate spot that works in 15 seconds and without audio. Not easy, but people do that in this sector every day.

As for DOOHgood itself, we can tell you that the DOOH4relief program for Japan produced at minimum 110 million ad impressions in March and April. Given we heard from perhaps 1/3 of the networks, the actual number was likely much higher. We’ll never really know with this or other efforts what the actual impact might be, but we do know Digital OOH screens get noticed and they do influence behavior.

If you have networks running in the affected regions, or think your screens can help provide food and shelter for tornado victims, please consider adding the spot to your playlist to help drive awareness and donations.

The DOOHgood team – made up of people from several firms in the digital signage/DOOH sector – are developing a framework for what we want to do and how things will be managed effectively. That will take more time. BUT, we do now have a website, and a logo!

Thanks to Insteo and rVue for their work on those two pieces.