According to a recent survey by the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), 40 percent of New Yorkers say they do not feel prepared for an emergency.
OEM and The Advertising Council team joined forces to encourage New Yorkers to be prepared if disaster strikes with this years Ready New York City campaign. Stuzo had the opportunity to work directly with their teams to develop a strong social component to this campaign during September’s National Preparedness Month.
With over 500 million active users and an estimated 8.2 million of those being New Yorkers engaged on Facebook (July 2010), collectively the teams knew this program was the perfect opportunity to leverage social platforms to raise awareness.
Emergencies can happen anywhere at anytime. The challenge set forth to our team was to develop an interactive application to help New Yorkers find a safe meeting place in case of an emergency and securely share this with their family and friends. With 70% of Facebook users actively using platform applications, we set our strategy on developing a custom emergency location map and sharing application within the Facebook platform. This strategy led to the creative process, production and launch of “Get Ready NYC: My Meeting Place.”
The team at Stuzo was able to incorporate a custom Google map within Facebook, which queries approximately 4,000 designated emergency meetings points in NYC. Users are able to browse the map in real-time to show these locations based on their interactions with the map. For a more refined view, each location is designated by a custom pin design and users are able to sort the map by the multiple location types such as: schools, churches, museums, post offices, libraries, courthouses, senior centers, police and fire stations.
One of the main goals for the experience was to allow users to input addresses such as their work, home or child’s school to show areas in close proximity that can serve as an emergency meeting point either by walk or drive. To facilitate this, the application allows users to input just a single address to find the closest meeting points in proximity or choose the option to input multiple addresses to find meeting places along there path. The extended search features enable users to plan for multiple location scenarios, share, print, email and soon SMS the map information to their friends and family.
For example, a mother who works in Times Square with a child in day care at Smart Toddler in Midtown, and a teenager at Independence High School can now input these multiple locations and find meeting paths along the way for her family to walk to and meet in case of an emergency. With the easy to use sharing and printing features these can be sent to the family member’s mobile phones, emailed or even quickly printed and placed in their backpack.
At Stuzo, we have launched over 200 custom social media campaigns powered by our Stuzo Social Engagement Platform for Fortune 1000 brands and their agencies. Every once in a while, we get the opportunity to work on a project that provides a valuable public service. As this project launch coincides with the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, our team has found “Get Ready NYC: My Meeting Place” to be a rewarding experience and a project of rememberance across the entire company.
We were honored to be able to provide families and citizens of New York an opportunity to enhance unity and awareness among their families and friends when it comes to identifying emergency meeting points using social technologies. With the powerful data and visualizations we can present to users leveraging Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps API’s – we look forward to continually being able to develop projects that provide valuable public services within social.
See more about this project on our work showcase.
