You’re a tech company in ecommerce that can donate a percentage of sales. You’re a social platform with a large amount of spare ad inventory. Whatever kind of tech company you are, you can do something for Haiti, whose recent earthquake has been described by the UN as the worst crisis it has ever faced.
So all this week we plan to update this post with information on acts of generosity by the tech startup community in Europe. Every-time your company does something to help Haiti, we’ll add you to the top of this post and retweet it, as much as we are able.
We’re also going to start this hashtag: #TechHaiti
Why? What can a Twitter hashtag do?
We want aid agencies, NGOs and relief organisations to be able FIND tech companies that could help them easily and, crucially, fast. As everyone now knows, news travels fast on Twitter and a hashtag is one simple, but potentially powerful way to highlight this.
And to clarify, no, we don’t want to ‘own’ this hashtag in any way. Just use it appropriately. Nor does anyone need to link back to this blog post.
The list below shows how tech companies are donating time and resources as well as money to help Haiti.
Contact editorial or leave a comment and we’ll update this list as much as we can (we also have normal work to do in the meantime).
• Yelp London is going to donate all money from Yelp’s Burst Bday coat check to the Red Cross Haiti Earthquake Appeal.
• Tom Hayton is doing digital portrait sessions to raise money for Doctors without Borders in Haiti.
• OnlineMeetingrooms.com is donating video conferencing for any aid organisation in Haiti.
• Umgmediagroup.it in Italy is donating 15% of ads space to Agire, italian’s group of NGOs (Save The children, Action Aid, Terre des hommes, Amref etc)
• Evert Bopp is a wireless expert putting together “a team of wireless engineers to actually go out there and build a number of wireless mesh networks in an attempt to re-establish voice & data comms for the relief agencies”.
• Chinwag.com has come up with an open source banner ad campaign you can use on your site here.
• Qype-UK is donating its sponsor ad space on its site to the Haiti Relief Effort. All proceeds will be donated to The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) which is made up of 13 member agencies who provide humanitarian aid in times of disaster.