How Wendy Harman Transformed the Use of Social Media at the American Red Cross

By Roger Lowe

“She was writing a tweet when President Obama stopped at her desk and asked him if he wanted to push the key to post it. (He did!) No one realized at the moment that it was the first tweet Obama had sent, and he did it from the @RedCross account, which made national news!"

During Wendy Harman’s nearly 10 years at the American Red Cross, she led the organization’s first steps into the new world of social media and its transformation into using social posts and other information to help disaster response decision-making in real time.

While working in the music business, Wendy had a front-row seat as peer-to-peer filesharing and the Internet in general completely disrupted the industry. “I could see that technology would disrupt everything as it had in the music industry, and I wanted to help other sectors navigate the change,” she said. And that brought her to the Red Cross in 2006.

At the time, there was no social media team at the Red Cross, which was still dealing with reputational issues following Hurricane Katrina, many based on ongoing misinformation. When Harman began her job, she was encouraged “to make the mean and untruthful internet commenters go away.” That was an impossible task, but what she did do was to engage with social media posters, leaving “nice comments to correct some of the misinformation” in their posts. 

“We grew from those early days of manually creating a "blog clipping service" and responding to social media posts to developing a proactive presence across emerging social media platforms,” Wendy said. “We built out a robust (and likable) social media presence and developed a listening-centered strategy that put disaster survivors, blood donors, CPR course takers, service members and monetary donors at the table of all Red Cross decision-making and operations.” 

A huge step forward was the creation and opening of a Digital Operations Center (called the DigiDoc) in 2012. The team used advanced tools provided by Salesforce and Dell in the DigiDoc to "listen" to every relevant conversation and to aggregate those thousands of individual comments into situational awareness that could inform disaster operations. Initially, the hard part was figuring out which of those social conversations were relevant, and Wendy and her team spent a great deal of time interviewing disaster operations leaders and staff to determine the types of real-time information that would be used to inform actions.

In addition, it was soon clear that the work to listen to and engage on social media with people during disasters was too much for the small social media team at National Headquarters, and Wendy found a new way to add people during times of need.

“We developed a first-of-its-kind digital volunteer role, recruiting and training hundreds of people to volunteer from the comfort of their jammies at home,” she said. “This was part of the strategy to move from that defensive position where we needed to prove the Red Cross was trustworthy and substantive to using these tools to further the mission.”

It was one of her proudest achievements at the Red Cross. “We saw so many people who wanted to do something meaningful after a disaster, and being able to put those folks to work as digital volunteers in a way that actually added value felt like a mutually beneficial feat,” she said.

Memorable – and Historic – Moments

Wendy’s most memorable moment happened over the course of a few days following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. 

“A day after the earthquake, we started seeing urgent posts to @RedCross from folks who were actually trapped in a grocery store in Haiti. They had enough connection to tweet, and could hear rescue workers outside but weren't getting rescued,” she said. 

“I was somewhat naive at the time and went on a frantic journey to try to get word to those rescuers of the 15-20 people trapped, including talking on the phone with relatives in Chicago, and navigating the State Department to coordinate rescue operations. My mind was on these people a couple of days later when President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama visited the Disaster Operations Center,” Harman said, not knowing she was about to make history.

She was writing a tweet when President Obama stopped at her desk and asked him if he wanted to push the key to post it. (He did!) No one realized at the moment that it was the first tweet Obama had sent, and he did it from the @RedCross account, which made national news! After the President’s tweet and a quick backrub from Michelle Obama, Harman went back to work and, sadly, learned the Haitians trapped in the earthquake did not survive. 

“This was personally memorable as an extreme juxtaposition of work highs and lows in a condensed timeframe, a stark experience showcasing how perception is not reality, and a motivator that we had so much more work to do to prove the thesis that we could navigate the use of technology for good,” Wendy said. “We still do.”

Life After the Red Cross

Wendy left Red Cross in 2016 when she was accepted into the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program with the White House. In this program, she worked to help youth and families in the child welfare system, and later was part of the Data Driven Justice Initiative to help counties and cities change how they serve their most vulnerable constituents. Wendy also helped improve access to cancer clinical trials at the National Cancer Institute through then-Vice President Biden's Cancer Moonshot Initiative. 

After her fellowship concluded, Wendy worked for ICF, continuing to do similar work as an industry partner to federal agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development and National Institutes of Health. 

In 2024, Wendy joined ServiceNow as Executive Director of Mission Success for Global Public Sector. “This is my first foray into working for a product company and in a global role, but continuing the mission-driven passion I have to help civil society and public sector institutions integrate emerging technology responsibly and in ways that improve life for most everyone.”

Passions and Priorities Outside of Work

“I continue to be passionate about child welfare, and I've served as a foster parent in DC and volunteer my time with local child welfare nonprofits,” Wendy said.

“I started playing tennis in 2020 and am obsessed - learning this (very hard) sport has given me community, humbled me and shown me again and again that mindset is so important in all of life's moments,” she said. “I have returned to my Floridian roots and enjoy lots of boating around the mid-Atlantic during the summer months. I garden, enjoy family and friends (including many from my Red Cross years) and spend time with my hilarious little dog Pearl.”

And in the future? “I think about becoming a Red Cross volunteer and may do that in 2025,” she said.