【Indonesia】

Facebook is Indonesiamaking it easier for relief organizations to pinpoint exactly where people are in crisis -- and discover exactly what they need.

The company announced at its second-annual Social Good Forum Wednesday that it will start sharing its API for the Community Help tool with disaster response organizations, giving them access to data that can help them deliver critical services to those in need. The API pulls information from public Community Help posts, providing organizations with the ID of the post, the type of help being asked for, and the location of the person requesting support.

The goal is to help rescue and relief efforts coordinate information and response resources as fast as possible, and be able to assess needs by location.

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Facebook officially launched its Community Help tool last year, integrating it with Safety Check and allowing people affected by crisis to ask for help, such as food and water, transportation, shelter, and baby supplies. It also allowed users to offer help, like if they had spare rooms or food.

The company is now piloting the new Community Help API with two organizations, the American Red Cross and NetHope, so people can get help in more efficient, impactful ways.

"Now organizations like the Red Cross will have access to data from Community Help so they can see what people are asking for in different areas," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's forum in New York City on Wednesday. "And they'll be able to use our location tools and our network to make sure supplies are getting to the people who need them. We're hoping that will make some of your jobs maybe a little more easy."

Facebook plans to announce more nonprofit partnerships with the Community Help API soon.

Community Help isn't the only API that Facebook is opening for social good. It's also launching its Fundraisers API, which will allow users to sync their off-Facebook fundraising pages to their Facebook fundraisers. For example, if you're raising money for men's health through a campaign on the Movember site, you can sync it with a Facebook fundraiser page; when you raise money in either location, the amount on both pages will update.

"The idea here is that it should be easy for anyone to donate and share fundraisers, no matter where they start."

"The idea here is that it should be easy for anyone to donate and share fundraisers, no matter where they start," Zuckerberg said.

Facebook is testing this new platform with the nonprofits Susan G. Komen, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Movember, and diabetes research organization JDRF through a partnership with social good software company Blackbaud and individual relationships. The tool will roll out to an additional 500 nonprofits by the end of spring 2018.

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At the Social Good Forum, Zuckerberg announced several other charitable giving updates, including that Facebook now waives all fees for fundraisers for nonprofits. That means that 100 percent of donations raised on nonprofit fundraisers will go to the cause and not to overhead. Previously, Facebook fundraisers took 5 percent of money raised — 2 percent for fraud prevention and security, and 3 percent for payment processing.

"Our goal has never been to make money from charitable giving, but as we've been starting out and getting the program going, I think we weren't sure how much things were going to cost and what we needed to do on our side around security and fraud detection and embedding and all of this stuff," said Naomi Gleit, VP of Social Good at Facebook. "We have a better handle on that now, and we feel like we can do this now, and have it be a sustainable program."

This also makes Facebook even more competitive in the fundraiser space -- other sites continue to take a certain percentage of each donation. GoFundMe, for example, takes 7.9 percent of transactions.

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But Facebook says it wants to go further, and even double the impact of donations made on the platform. The company has created a $50 million annual Facebook Donations Fund that will match donations made on Facebook to causes it chooses throughout the year. It's designed to help communities recover from disasters and help more people support the causes they care about.

This is similar to Facebook's previous efforts with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which matched up to $2 million in donations made through Facebook's charitable giving tools on Giving Tuesday. The new fund, however, will allow Facebook to match donations beyond one day a year. (Gleit also announced at the Social Good Forum that overall, a total of $45 million was collectively raised on Facebook for Giving Tuesday this week.)

"In 71 countries, there is a shortage of safe blood in hospitals and blood banks."

As of Wednesday, Facebook's nonprofit fundraising tools are also now available in 16 additional markets in Europe, and personal fundraisers have launched in several European markets, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Along with announcing a new Mentorship and Support tool, Facebook's final announcement at the Social Good Forum was the expansion of its blood donation tool.

"In 71 countries, there is a shortage of safe blood in hospitals and blood banks," said Hema Budaraju, product manager for health at Facebook, at the event. "And in many of these countries, people turn to their families and friends for help, and use platforms like Facebook to find blood donors in their communities."

The tool, which started as a hackathon project but launched in India as a full product in September, will be available in early 2018 in Bangladesh -- one of those very countries Budaraju was talking about. Users will be able to find blood donors nearby, and also offer to give blood by signing up and designating their blood type.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

All of Wednesday's announcements point to Facebook's new mission -- to empower its users to build communities -- and its growing focus on social good.

"We started three years ago, and I'm just more excited about it than ever," Gleit, who has been at the company for 12 years, said about Facebook's Social Good team.

"I've always felt like we're doing important things, but now we have more team, more partners, and more support to do that."

Correction: This post previously stated that Facebook is waiving fees for both personal and nonprofit fundraisers. Fees will only be waived for nonprofits.

Related Video: Facebook's Community Help tool in action

Topics Facebook Social Good Innovations