Throughout much of its 11-year history, Facebook has been used as a tool to raise awareness and donations in times of crisis, whether it be for the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that rocked Japan in 2011 or for this year's ebola crisis.
Now, Facebook is looking to play a more active role in those efforts.
Naomi Gleit, a longtime Facebook manager, revealed Sunday that the social network has created a team "dedicated to and committed to social good" during a panel discussion at Mashable's annual Social Good Summit in New York.
Facebook's social good team, which numbers in the dozens, is less focused on activism and on-the-ground work than building a new suite of products that tap into the social causes and personal needs of its community. Even those efforts can have a tremendous impact when you consider every feature has the potential to tap into a community of nearly 1.5 billion people.
The group has so far worked to push out Amber Alerts to help find missing children, a feature called Safety Check to quickly notify friends and family that you're safe after a disaster and a simplified Donate Now button used to raise money for ALS during the viral Ice Bucket Challenge and after the devastating Nepal earthquake. The last of those raised $10 million from some 700,000 users for Nepal relief.
Facebook is currently analyzing the activity of its users affected by the migrant crisis in the Middle East and Europe to determine what tools, if any, it can build to help people receive aid, get in touch with relatives or organize grassroots support.
These ambitions were kept under wraps for months as the team got its sea legs and tested an initial set of products. This week, however, Gleit and others are planning to attend dinners, happy hours and a closed door demo with 20 non-profits to learn from the community and get its foot in the door.
IMAGE: FACEBOOK
Facebook's new top priority
The social good effort began, like so many projects at Facebook, with a personal request from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Gleit, one Facebook's earliest employees and the new head of the social good team, previously spent the past decade working to grow Facebook's user base from one million to well over one billion.
"I worked on growth because I thought it was the most important thing," Gleit told Mashable in a sit-down interview prior to her appearance on stage. But about a year ago, "Mark said, I have another more important thing for you to work on.' And that was social good. He really wanted to create a team that was just focused on how can we do the most good."
IMAGE: FACEBOOK
Zuckerberg has increasingly put his estimated $40 billion net worth toward charitable causes like education and ebola, topping the list of U.S. philanthropists last year. He has also used Facebook's vast resources to push for Internet access in the emerging world, occasionally to the frustration of Facebook analysts who question the benefits of this approach to the bottom line.
"It matters to the kind of investors that we want to have," Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts earlier this year, defending his Internet.org project to connect the world. "Because we are really a mission-focused company."
That mission now explicitly extends to broader social good efforts. The goal, according to Gleit, is "to understand how people are already using Facebook for good, identify ways we can amplify that and make it easier, and then execute by building products."
In the past, calls to action for certain crises might be promoted in the premium online real estate that is the top of Facebook's News Feed in large part because they were issues Zuckerberg cared deeply about, according to sources Mashable spoke with last year.
That, Gleit says, is no longer the case.
"It really is bottom up," she says. "We don’t want to do whatever Mark thinks is most important or whatever I think is most important. That's not the position we want to be in."
Facebook isn't the first or only technology company to flex its muscles in this area. Google hassolicited donations for crises like ebola and launched tools to search for missing people in disaster situations. Twitter recently partnered with Square to process political donations, opening up the possibility of similar tools for causes.
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