Take a look at a new site from USAID. The new campaign by USAID, FWD, is an effort to raise broader awareness to the conditions in the Horn of Africa. FWD stands for Famine, War, Drought, all of which are devastating the Horn of Africa. The website does a great job of easily showing the facts and devastation to the region. The USAID site does a great job raising citizen awareness and encouraging engagement. On the site, citizens are able to send a text to make a donation to help in Africa. This is for sure a smart move, as 31% of all adults prefer to be contacted via text message. It will be interesting to see any follow up from this campaign, and how successful the USAID was.
It should be no surprise that USAID collects a lot of data through their international work. Part of the effort behind the FWD initiative was to share and open the data and use data to tell stories about the crisis in the Horn of Africa. Through the use of data, USAID is able to show the great work USAID is doing and how much work is still left to be done. All data has been published to data.gov, and USAID has moved away from PDF’s.
This is a pretty cool initiative from USAID, it’s a unique way to encourage citizen engagement, great use of data and looks like USAID has made a lot of great strides in the Gov 2.0 space. Be sure to take a look at the site.