Timo Luege at Social Media for Good: “In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR shows how to conduct meaningful, qualitative social media monitoring in a humanitarian crisis.
Between March and December 2016 the project team (one project manager, one Pashto and Dari speaker, two native Arabic speakers and an English copy editor) monitored Facebook conversations related to flight and migration in the Afghan and Arabic speaking communities.
To do this, the team created Facebook accounts, joined relevant Facebook groups and summarised their findings in weekly monitoring reports to UNHCR staff and other interested people. I received these reports every week while working as the UNHCR team leader for the Communicating with Communities team in Greece and found them very useful since they gave me insights into what were some of the burning issues that week.
The project did not monitor Twitter because Twitter was not widely used by the communities.
In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR has now summarised their findings from the ten-month project. The main thing I really liked about this project is that UNHCR invested the resources for proper qualitative social media monitoring, as opposed to the purely quantitative analyses that we see so often and which rarely go beyond keyword counting. To complement the social media information, the team held focus group and other discussions with refugees who had arrived in Europe. Among other things, these discussion provided information on how the refugees and migrants are consuming and exchanging information (related: see this BBC Media Action report).
Of course, this type of research is much more resource intensive than what most organisations have in mind when they want to do social media monitoring, but this report shows that additional resources can also result in more meaningful information.
Smuggling prices according to monitored Facebook page. Source: From A Refugee Perspective
Monitoring the conversations on Facebook enabled the team to track trends, such as the rise and fall of prices that smugglers asked for different routes (see image). In addition, it provided fascinating insights into how smugglers are selling their services online….(More)”