On Tuesday, Wendy Harman, senior specialist for interactive media at the American Red Cross, was working to set up a Facebook page to solicit donations for the organization, which has been working to help the victims in the states ravaged by recent floods and tornadoes.

Facebook is but one of the Web 2.0 and social media tools the nonprofit is relying on to help relay information to and from storm victims and Red Cross volunteers on the ground in areas affected by the recent natural disasters.

The organization has created an online newsroom powered by the WordPress blogging tool that is dedicated to providing information on flood damages along with a Google Maps mashup that shows where the organization is working. The organization has also created a Twitter channel, a presence on online photo sharing site Flickr and a YouTube channel.

On its main blog, for example, the organization Tuesday posted updated lists of shelters and food and supply distribution sites in Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas and Indiana. While some of the tools were created for the latest disaster - like the Google Maps mashup - others have been used over the past year and a half as the organization tapped free, easy-to-use tools to help its workers and to inform the public of their work.

"[The Google Maps mashup] is a good way to visualize in an interactive way our response," Harman said. "Once you see all those pins on a map you say, 'Wow.' It is a pretty alarming visual. I think that is why it has resonated."

The Google mashup, for example, shows that the organization has ongoing disaster relief operations in Michigan, Nebraska, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and West Virginia and other states because of the recent flooding and tornadoes.

The online newsroom was created to provide updates to the national media, but has since added new features such as links to audio clips from volunteers and victims that are posted to the micro-blogging site Twitter. The recordings are made using the Utterz multimedia blogging site, which relays the messages to Twitter. The recording can be heard via PCs or mobile phones, Harman added.

While the online newsroom was originally set up to provide an automated way to update the national media about relief efforts, it has since grown larger than that.

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