The response of aid agencies to last week’s Haiti earthquake has been typical, in an impressive sort of way; fast, public, efficient – it’s how we expect (and hope) charities to respond to crisis.

But in this disaster, for the first time, charities have taken on a new role. Charities have become as – or more – authoritative sources of news on the disaster than, well, the news. Aid agencies have, for many people, become a proxy BBC.

While the BBC and other news organisations were trying to arrange flights in to Port-au-Prince organisations like Oxfam, Unicef and the like were already disseminating eye witness accounts via Twitter. Pictures, reports, video came first out of aid organisations before even Reuters had begun to send its feed out to the nightly news. And, critical for any news organisation, not only is what is coming out of the aid organisations breaking and current – it is trusted. Anyone looking for up to the minute reports from the field is as likely to ‘follow’ the British Red Cross as they are to follow the other Beeb.

This has been the first natural disaster to strike when Twitter has been an actual online force, and not just something stuck to the fringes of the technorati. Charities use of social media to inform supporters as global citizens, not just donors, in a crisis has occurred so smoothly as to seem natural, and not a radical departure from their traditional role as on the ground workers and funders.

And it’s working. The Disasters Emergency Committee today announced it has received more than £23m in donations by online and phone alone.

A quick look at the DEC twitter feed explains all. The organisation has more than 2,000 followers in a matter of days and is updating its feed not just with repetitive (and all important) asks, but with reports from the ground, podcasts, Flickr links, field diaries, YouTube videos.

Prime-time television appeals will never lose their clout, but the days of charities simply packaging a press release, producing a tight 90-second advertisement and sending it out into the great yonder may well be over.

Charities can communicate their message instantly, with rich content unmediated by others or beholden to news organisations’ deadlines. And, in some small comfort to the victims in Haiti, they are doing it very, very well.

Picture courtesy of ActionAid.