Relief group using social media to help rebuild Haiti

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti in January led to an immediate outpouring of texts, tweets and Facebook posts offering relief and asking for help.

In the months since that outpouring, however, donors have questioned how that money has been spent, and reports indicate much of those funds haven’t yet been used.

Choose Haiti, an initiative that aims to create jobs in the still-reeling Caribbean nation, plans to use Facebook to prove to contributors that their money is going directly to Haitian relief efforts.

“You have people who give money and they think it’s for certain things, and it ends up going to operating costs,” says Paul Johnson, partner at StudioE9, the digital studio that manages social media for Choose Haiti. “When people give money to something, they would like to know how it’s going to be used.”