In the past two decades, disasters have left a devastating impact, claiming over a million lives and causing nearly US$3 trillion in global economic losses, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

When responding to disasters, disaster relief organizations (DROs) play a crucial role by mobilizing physical resources such as food and water to help impacted communities. During times of crisis, information resources are just as important as these physical resources. As such, DROs use social media to provide information rapidly and broadly to those that need it.

Many DROs post information via multiple social media accounts on a single platform, with each account representing a unique branch like national headquarters and a local chapter.

Crisis communications studies suggest that a DRO's communication channels or social media accounts follow the strategy of "speaking with one voice" during the entire disaster response.

My research focuses on information management during and after disasters. My colleagues—Eunae Yoo and Lu (Lucy) Yan from Indiana University, and Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez from the University of Notre Dame—and I conducted a study that challenges the idea of "speaking with one voice." We argue that this recommended strategy does not uniformly hold across the disaster management cycle.

Tailoring messages to audiences

Audiences for disaster communications include disaster victims, volunteers, donors and other supporters. Sending one consistent message on various accounts and platforms produces messages targeting the same audience when responding to a disaster.

Alternatively and counter-intuitively, however, coordination may be facilitated by producing messages intended for different audiences. Using Twitter data collected in partnership with the Canadian Red Cross (CRC), our research shows that during the urgent response phase, social media engagement improves by 4.3 percent from producing convergent content through the match of audiences, while a mismatch or a divergence of audiences yields 29.6 percent more engagement when uncertainty subsides during the recovery phase.

Our study recommends that DROs take a more nuanced and dynamic approach than prior crisis communication studies suggest, demonstrating the importance of adapting communication strategies to different phases of disaster management.

Case study: Fort McMurray wildfire

We looked at communications on Twitter after the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which was the costliest Canadian natural disaster. The fire reached a size of more than 480,000 hectares in just a few days, and caused estimated insured losses of $3.7 billion. More than 80,000 people were evacuated—the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta—and the fire destroyed the region's nearby communities, oil sands facilities and infrastructures.

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