DOOHgood For Sandy’s Victims

October 31, 2012 by Dave Haynes

 

Source: Getty Images

It’s been hard to sort out what the trigger point is for firing up the DOOHgood relief engine, but the images and video that started coming out of the US Northeast as daylight came Tuesday was enough.

There are hundreds of thousands of ad-based, retail and corporate digital screens out there and most or all of them have available slots that could be used to remind people that a lot of others are in big need of assistance in the coming days. A lot of communities – particularly in New Jersey – were hit very hard by the so-called SuperStorm that roared through that region on Monday and overnight.

I live hundreds of kilometres from the Atlantic, and we were seeing 100 kmh gusts at the height of it, so I can only imagine what it is like when you live somewhere that is not conditioned and engineered for that kind of wind and flooding.

The DOOHgood thing is simple. Allocate some time on your network and run video spots that drive money to the American Red Cross, which is a universally trusted relief organization. We have a website – first used for the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan – that is designed to act as a download and distribution hub for spots.

The first thing we need is those spots. As always, we are looking for vendors and creative services teams to put together 15-second spots that will run on participating networks. DOOHgood does not have its own creative team, so we need that help.

As an interesting alternative, and certainly until someone steps up with creative, Insteo (probably DOOHgood’s biggest supporter) has developed a Twitter app that can run on any content management system that supports HTML5. The app is a visualization that calls hashtags and keywords related to the Sandy relief effort. Insteo knows its way around Twitter integration better than anyone in this space, and also has algorithms that filter out crap.

You can have a look at that app here: http://apps.insteo.com/twitter/twitter-landscape.html?vfk=3c261bd9-571d-4b&k=a6120f16-fd86-4a The app should be ready to use by midday Wednesday and it is free. You will just have to drop the URL into your layout (assuming it can handle HTML5) and off she goes. Let me know in the comments if you are using.

If you can produce a video spot, please let me know and we’ll get it ready to distribute on the DOOHgood site. Our only asks are that you follow the specs and include the simple call to action: To donate $10, text the word REDCROSS to 90999.

You can get B-roll here: http://www.videobluemoon.com/default.php (make sure you follow the guidelines) or images here: http://media.redcross.org/sites/

We’ll keep things updated as we get information, and let you know when ads come available.

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