Corporate - Humanitarian Organization Partnerships and the Effect of Social Media Use on Humanitarian Operations

Providing effective responses to natural disasters is beyond the individual capacities of most government agencies, firms, and humanitarian organizations. Thus, these actors must cultivate partnerships and facilitate collaborative practices to respond more effectively to natural disasters such as for example floods and earthquakes. To understand how corporate-humanitarian organization partnerships succeed in this respect, we will study the types of partnerships and the circumstances to create these successful cross-sectoral partnerships. Next, we will study the benefits and the risks of using social media during disaster response. The project will be built on field research and data gathered from interviews, organizational documents, websites, and news media data. The project will be carried out at Industrial Engineering and Management Unit at Tampere University.