Cycle races and fires may not seem like obvious subjects to write about in the same few paragraphs but bear with me if you will… At VMAGroup’s office South Africa, we are reminded on a daily basis of the unique challenges faced by communications professionals working in this part of the world from a shortage of training and development opportunities to the complexities of adapting your narrative to a culturally diverse group of stakeholders in an increasingly digitally-driven world. There is meat enough there for a separate article. This is about something else.

On the weekend of March 10th two separate events occurred within a few miles of each other in Cape Town which provided two of the most compelling case studies for the power of social media I have seen to date. In the early hours of Saturday morning, residents of Hout Bay in Cape Town watched, horrified, as the nearby informal settlement went up in flames. Imizamo Yethu or ‘IY’ as it’s referred to locally is home to some 15,000 residents, the majority of whom were made homeless overnight.

Several kilometres away, in the days leading up to Sunday 12th March, thousands of people had arrived in Cape Town for the Cape Town Cycle Tour, bringing with them high-tech bikes costing more than what many of the IY residents earn in a year. They came from all over the country and from all over the world. The race has reached iconic status on the cycle circuit and more than 35,000 were signed up to ride 109km around the peninsula.  Following texts to the riders the night before warning of winds and a further text message regarding a route change, at 06h38 on Sunday morning the race was cancelled predominantly due to the exceptionally high winds which were deemed too dangerous to ride in and the roads needing to be kept clear for emergency vehicles to attend to the fire.  What has followed in the days since these two events occurred from a communications point of view has been extraordinary to watch.

The IY fire shone a light on a community which in response to the crisis transformed itself in a matter of hours into a well-oiled machine which, as though some invisible signal had been given, deployed large groups of volunteers from every section of the community to various points where help was needed: sports centres, schools, playing fields and the smouldering site of the fire itself. The community NGO sprang into action to co-ordinate the collection and distribution of the supplies of food, clothing and financial aid which began to pour in. None of it, however, would have happened without the mobilising, information-gathering and disseminating power of social media – certainly not with the astonishing speed that it did. Whatsapp groups formed within hours; the area’s closed group Facebook page, usually a lively, often irreverent, highly informative repository for everything about the area, became a serious mouthpiece for the community, the primary platform for updates on where volunteers and victims should go to on any given hour on any day to offer help and receive support. Local radio stations tweeted calls for help and the help came fast. Local restaurants posted messages asking people to bring bags of vegetables and their own peelers and join them in their kitchens to prepare soup for the fire victims, others posted offers to deliver pizzas and hotdogs; others scrambled hashtagged fundraising events for the days ahead. There were the inevitable trumpeting tweets from a few businesses about the good they were doing but no one had time to point fingers – everyone was too busy with what really mattered. This was a crisis management plan being rolled out ‘on the hoof’ driven by Facebook, Twitter, online newsfeeds, a dynamic NGO and a community shaken by what had happened to it. This plan had had no dry-runs, it had no carefully crafted messages and infographics to upload.   The messages on every channel have been succinct and punchy and often grammatically shambolic but they got the message across and that’s all that mattered.

The communications response of the Cape Cycle Tour to its own crisis couldn’t have been more different in its execution and approach. There were weather updates the night before, alerts the morning of, and eventually the ‘Race cancelled’ SMS hit thousands of mobile phones simultaneously. From then on a very different kind of well-oiled machine sprang into action. The newsfeed on their website scrolled endlessly with updates. The ‘question’ buttons on the Tour’s Facebook page appeared, a brilliantly visual way to provide answers to all the questions people most desperately wanted answers to. The Facebook page was slick, the messages were well crafted and the language careful, striking exactly the right tone in being both factual and authoritative but also concerned, deeply aware of the impact of the 11th hour decision on each individual rider. Tonally, each message which appeared online was perfect. It has to date been a brilliantly executed and perfectly pitched response to a very different kind of tragedy; not quite the same as losing your house but bitterly disappointing if you have spent months training and a great deal of money and time to get here to be part of this iconic event.  Of course you would expect it from an event on this scale which has been a year in the planning – the Cycle Tour team would have prepared all this meticulously months ago – in case the unthinkable happened…

In the end, two very different events were united in the bizarre way in which seemingly unrelated happenings often are. The organisers of the Cycle Tour donated all the prize money to the fire relief fund along with thousands of food parcels and water bottles and one crisis came to the aid of another. A fire and a cycle race: two very different events occurring in the space of 24 hours, each eliciting two very different but brilliantly executed social media campaigns. Communications at its most powerful.