The Use of 360° Video by International Humanitarian Aid Organizations to Spread Social Messages and Increase Engagement

RESEARCH PAPERS The Use of 360  Video by International Humanitarian Aid Organizations to Spread Social Messages and Increase Engagement Berta Garcı ´a-Orosa 1 •Sara Pe ´rez-Seijo 1 Accepted: 23 September 2020 / Published online: 27 October 2020 The Author(s) 2020 Abstract The article analyses 360video production in international humanitarian aid nonprofit organizations from 2015 to 2019 as 360video storytelling is one of the latest innovations in organizational digital communication. Through a content analysis and interviews, a specific use of the 360video format for particular issues or campaigns in order to bring a distant reality to the organization’s audience has been detected. Thus, putting the users in the shoes of ‘‘the other’’ seems to be the objective pursued. NGOs may soon begin to understand long-term interactivity and engagement not just as action and reaction between organization and receiver (almost non-existent to date), but above all as the receiver’s behaviour, which they may strive to orient towards one of the organization’s end goals, depending on the communication strategy set by the organization’s director. With this objective, common to entities from other sectors, they could be moving towards an innovative conceptualization of engagement. Keywords 360videos Public relations Engagement  Digital communication Immersive witnessing Virtual reality Interactivity Engagement and Public Relations Public Relations (PR) began an important path in digital communication with their audiences about 25 years ago. After an initial period in which they imported the offline strategies into the web, the organizations developed particular actions adapted to the logic of the Internet and to their circumstances (Garcı ´a-Orosa 2019). During the last years, they have consolidated their digital communication model by incorporating technological innovations until reaching the current hybrid communication model (Chadwick 2013; Hamilton 2016; Taiminen et al. 2015; Penney 2017). In this stage, in addition to combining traditional methods of communication with innovations, PR directors seek empathy with the receiver either for economic reasons or to win the receiver’s approval. When it comes to economic reasons, directors aim for a greater and larger presence of people in their digital spaces, thereby increasing ad revenue and obtaining big data. When attempting to earn the receiver’s approval, directors seek to generate shortand long-term engagement. Engagement has become one of communication directors’ greatest goals, to the point that some authors indicate that we are in the era of engagement (Morehouse and Saffer 2019). Despite being discussed in 1990s studies, engagement as a concept still lacks a theoretically formed model with structure and a clear and coherent explanation (Shen and Jiang 2019; Dhanesh 2017). The definitions come from disparate areas and range from assimilation of engagement with interactivity to concepts more linked to psychological commitment and philosophy with the construction of behaviour with distinct levels of hierarchical activity ranging from the consumption of passive messages to active, online bidirectional conversation, participation and recommendation (Taylor and Kent 2014; Men and Tsai &Berta Garcı ´a-Orosa [email protected] Sara Pe ´rez-Seijo [email protected] 1 University of Santiago de Compostela, Avenida de Castelao s/n. 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain 123 Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-020-00280-z 2013). Dhanesh (2017) summarises them in two major conceptualizations of engagement: (1) as communicative interaction, manifested as clicks, likes, views, shares, comments, tweets, recommendations, and other user-generated content; and (2) the dichotomous notions of engagement as control based on transactional modes of communication (public information, two-way asymmetry, dissemination of organizational messages) and engagement as online collaboration based on participatory modes of communication (dialogue, co-creation of content, etc.). In practice, NGOs also sought audience participation and engagement in many ways. In the first phase of digital communication and PR, the research community emphasizes the importance of the dialogic function, basically by applying the theoretical framework proposed by Kent and Taylor (1998) (Aula 2011; Sommerfeldt et al. 2012; Sisson 2017; Du-Plessis 2018; Souder 2016). But, at the same time, the literature noted the lack of interactivity with websites and blogs during this first stage (Lee 2012; Capriotti and Pardo-Kuklinski 2012). Since the onset of the twenty-first century, social media have allowed for greater relationship-building and are particularly attractive for NGOs with scarce resources (Svensson et al. 2014; Smith 2018), though some authors already question the benefits related to the strategies and circumstances in which these social networks are used (Lam and Nie 2020; Guo and Saxton 2018). While it was initially believed that mere presence on social media would create dialogue and participation, it was soon understood that this was in fact a strategic decision (Smith 2018) heavily influenced—like the choice between online and offline—by the social environment, dependence on resources (Lam and Nie 2020) and the prioritized modalities of engagement and relationship with the public (Campbell and Lambright 2020). The theoretical framework created by Lovejoy and Saxton (2012) is commonly used for this type of analysis. The authors proposed one of the first categorizations of tweets published by nonprofit organizations, identifying three general functions for tweets: information, community and action. In practice, they diversify the functions such as recruiting volunteers, campaigning for donations, advocating for change (Ciszek 2013) or establishing a specific relationship with the media (Lee and Desai 2014). Other authors stress communication’s potential for fund raising (Saxton and Wang 2014) without direct evidence of the connection between the frequency of social media use and the propensity to donate online (Reddick and Ponomariov 2012). In general, while researchers have emphasised the potential of social media in terms of bidirectionality, interactivity, dialogue and engagement in the disparate areas of study (Utz et al. 2013; Vesnic-Alujevic 2012; Abitbol and Lee 2017; Ji et al. 2018;Ga ´lvez-Rodrı ´guez et al. 2014; Painter 2015), it is rarely used (Carim and Warwick 2013; Svensson et al. 2014; Maiorescu 2017) and sometimes only as a complement to particular dialogues on the web. Today, a new way to enhance audience interaction, participation and engagement has arisen with novel narratives such as 360video storytelling, based on virtual reality technologies and 360video (Domı ´nguez 2015; Suh et al. 2018; Bindman et al. 2018; Yoo and Drumwright 2018). Despite being one of the least-studied fields during the past decade (Fraustino et al. 2018; Yoo and Drumwright 2018), some preliminary findings show similarities between the user experience with a VR headset and a reallife experience (Wagler and Hanus 2018). This similarity could allow PR to connect interactivity and long-term engagement not only to the interaction between the organization and the receiver, but also to the behaviour linked to the organization’s end goal, in a more or less hierarchical way depending on the communication strategy established by each director. In this regard, Dhanesh (2017) stresses three main areas of work: digital engagement (including nonprofit civic engagement and engagement during crisis); employee engagement; and stakeholder engagement. This article, in studying 360reality in international nonprofit organizations, seeks to add to the literature in that first, seldom-studied area, which also contains important elements for advancing in engagement, one of the aspects that may reshape PR in the coming years (Jelen-Sanchez 2017). In the following section, scientific advances and previous experiences are discussed. Immersive Storytelling as a Useful Communication Tool for Humanitarian Aid Organizations Within the field of PR, humanitarian aid nonprofit organizations have always been interested in engagement (Lovejoy et al. 2012; Cho et al. 2014) and they have seen in 360video storytelling a timely and alternative way to connect with audiences and bring the social contexts where they work closer to the users (Nash 2018; Soler-Adillon and Sora 2018; Fraustino et al. 2018). According to Irom (2018, 4269), ‘‘in recent years, virtual reality (VR) has gained traction in humanitarian communication through its utopian promises of copresence, experiential immediacy, and transcendence’’. Humanitarian organizations started experimenting with 360video and virtual reality technologies at the end of 2015, while media outlets from all over the world (Al Jazeera, The New York Times, British Broadcasting Corporation, Vice News, etc.) were trying to produce their first immersive content using spherical video (Doyle et al. 2016), an effort many others have replicated. 1312 Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 123 A recurrent topic, especially among the European media and nonprofit organizations, is migration. Issues such as the Mediterranean migratory wave, armed conflicts like the Syrian Civil War or the implications of climate change are common topics in nonprofit organizations’ immersive productions (Nash 2018; Irom 2018;Pe ´rez-Seijo and Garcı ´a-Orosa 2020). In the field of humanitarian communication, an example is Clouds over Sidra (2015), a documentary film about the Syrian refugee crisis produced by Chris Milk and Gabo Arora with the UN in partnership with Samsung. The use of 360video and virtual reality technologies to create news or non-fiction content is known as Immersive Journalism (De la Pen ˜a et al. 2010; Hardee 2016), described as ‘‘the production of news in a form in which people can gain first-person experiences of the events or situation described in news stories’’ (De la Pen ˜a et al. 2010: 291). A novel trend has arisen under distinct influences: video games’ logics and narratives (Domı ´nguez 2013), game thinking strategies (Longhi 2017; Domı ´nguez 2015), theatre, interactive documentary, and even film (Elmezeny et al. 2018; Soler-Adillon and Sora 2018). As it is based on a remediation of practices (Soler-Adillon and Sora 2018), Immersive Journalism represents a good example of the current hybrid scenario that digital journalism is facing (Hamilton 2016). However, Immersive Journalism has been known by disparate, even in accurate names such as VR Journalism (Owen et al. 2015; Sirkkunen et al. 2016), 360storytelling (Elmezeny et al. 2018), or 360video journalism (Van Damme et al. 2019), which reflects the common confusion on what authors and journalists understand by virtual reality and 360video. Since the media are also improperly labelling spherical videos as VR experiences (Smith 2015), it is necessary to differentiate between VR journalism and 360video journalism, though both are major types of Immersive Journalism. The first consists of the production of content through 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI), often based on factual evidence, and it has been driven by Nonny De la Pen ˜a and its VR company Emblematic Group with works such Hunger in L.A. (2012) or Kiya (2015). Nonetheless, 360video journalism or storytelling is more widespread (Hardee and McMahan 2017), tends to consist of real image videos with less interactivity and agency (Domı ´nguez 2017) but is faster and less expensive to produce than truly VR experiences (Pe ´rez-Seijo and Lo ´pez-Garcı ´a2018). The popularization of what are also known as spherical videos for news production was primarily due to Facebook and YouTube. In 2015, both democratised access to such content by allowing the free upload of 360videos on their social platforms, which helped news outlets, nonprofit organizations and other producers to almost eliminate or reduce distribution costs (Watson 2017; Mabrook and Singer 2019). Furthermore, it facilitated users’ access to and viewing of 360videos, reaching a larger audience as viewers do not always need a virtual reality headset to watch the content on Facebook and YouTube, since both platforms allow mobile (by tilting a smartphone or tablet) and web browser consumption (Watson 2017; Pillai et al. 2017; Herranz et al. 2019). The hallmark of this novel digital trend is that, for the first time, users can cross the screen while watching 360 videos or VR experiences wearing a virtual reality headset (Domı ´nguez 2013), leading to a first-person experience of what is shown and told in the news story (De la Pen ˜a et al. 2010;Benı ´tez and Herrera 2017). Additionally, when the users perceive the other reality (the virtual world) to be more engaging than their own physical reality, they are experiencing what is called presence (Slater and Wilbur 1997, 4). Presence here means the perceptual illusion of no-mediation (Lombard and Ditton 1997) experienced by a user in a mediated environment which, as a result, leads to the feeling of ‘‘being there’’, in the other or other’s reality (Slater and Wilbur 1997; Ijsselsteijn and Riva 2003; Slater and Sanchez-Vives 2016), in the virtual environment, despite the user’s physical presence in another reality, that is, his or her everyday reality (Witmer and Singer 1998, 225). Per Suh et al. (2018), the use of VR headsets leads to higher levels of sense of presence, which in turn increases audience engagement. Nevertheless, Shin and Biocca (2017: 2802) suggest that ‘‘immersive or drooling interfaces do not, as the journalism industry claims, necessarily enhance the sense of engagement or satisfaction’’, or even empathy (Bindman et al. 2018). In this regard, the results of the study conducted by Bindman et al. (2018: 8) show that ‘‘strong use of narrative techniques may be most important to make viewers understand their role and feel a part of the story’’. Virtual reality headsets allow users to cross the screen and to be immersed in the scene, becoming a passive visitor or a simulated witness. The image surrounds the users so they ‘‘can turn in any direction while a fixed, linear story unfolds around them’’ (Elmezeny et al. 2018, 2). Immersive journalism presents new challenges, because ‘‘when journalists decide to invite audiences to witness a news event ‘as if they were there’’’ they are, in fact, acquiring ‘‘new responsibilities towards audiences’’ (Sa ´nchez Laws and Utne 2019: 1). The first-person experience coupled with the ‘‘as if I was there’’ feeling experienced by users prompts reflection on the conventional concept of the viewer and leads to the consideration of users as immersive witnesses on the scene: ‘‘immersive media reality potentially enables witnessing because of its capacity to give us a Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 1313 123 sense of embodied presence in the context of a violation, crisis or human rights context’’ (Gregory 2016). The possibility of ‘‘being there’’ (De la Pen ˜a et al. 2010), surrounded by the image, represents the paradigmatic case of witnessing (Peters 2011, 38). However, this transportation to the other’s reality is simulated and mediated by technology, a virtual reality headset. Nonetheless, this kind of immersive witnessing ‘‘links the experience of VR with a moral attitude of responsibility for distant others’’ (Nash 2018, 1). Such immersive storytelling can bring closer a particular social reality through a simulated journey to the narrative world, a first-person experience that enables users to walk in someone else’s shoes. Consequently, some suppose this helps to create more empathetic bonds between the user and the distant other (Soler-Adillon and Sora 2018; Hardee 2016). Some claim that the use of virtual reality and 360video to create stories enhances empathy, so a stronger link with the distant other or reality could be generated (Milk 2015; Kool 2016;Sa ´nchez Laws 2017 Archer and Finger 2018). But Van Damme et al. (2019, 1) conducted an experimental study on distant suffering and found that while place illusion and enjoyment were higher in 360videos, no significant evidence of greater involvement with the distant other were found. On the other hand, Suh et al. (2018, 437) found ‘‘that audience engagement is mainly determined by the audience’s degree of presence while viewing a 360 video’’. Still, picture quality could interfere (Shin and Biocca 2017, 2817). On the other hand, an experimental study about disaster communication and spatial presence found that ‘‘360 video featuring the aftermath of a natural disaster yields enhanced attitudes towards the helpful impact of the content’’(Fraustino et al. 2018, 331). In this regard, another study shows that ‘‘VR formats prompted a higher empathetic response than static photo/text treatments and a higher likelihood of participants to take ‘political or social action’ after viewing’’ (Archer and Finger 2018). Moreover, Yoo and Drumwright (2018) carried out an experiment with users using a 360video about a Syrian refugee camp as a stimulus and discovered that viewers wearing a VR headset experienced greater levels of donation intention, vividness, interactivity and social presence than the tablet users. The main aim of this paper is to examine how and why nonprofit organizations are integrating 360video storytelling into their communication strategies. Thus, the following research questions are posed: RQ1: To what extent do European humanitarian organizations use 360videos as a tool to tell stories and bring the realities where they work or advocate closer to the users and to drive engagement? RQ2: What are the main topics and purposes behind each production (explore a place, witness an event, listen to a victim, etc.)? RQ3: How and through which elements (audio recordings, graphics, headers and other audio or visual aids) is the multimedia narrative reinforced in the 360videos published by NGOs? RQ4: Through which platforms do the humanitarian organizations disseminate this kind of content? RQ5: To what extent do the 360videos include options for engagement? Methodology The effect of new technologies, formats and narratives in the field of PR communication strategies has not been studied a great deal. Although widely studied in journalism, organizational communication seems to have been relegated to the backburner. In this sense, the aim of this proposal is to analyse if, how and why Europe’s main humanitarian aid nonprofit organizations take advantage of 360/VR storytelling, an issue addressed by only a few studies to date (Irom 2018; Yoo and Drumwright 2018; Fraustino et al. 2018;Pe ´rez-Seijo and Garcı ´a-Orosa 2020). Many news outlets have seen the potential of this narrative form and have tried to implement it to engage users and significantly enhance bonds between viewers and stories. Based on this idea, humanitarian aid organizations and other nonprofit organizations have tested the new, distinct possibilities enabled by 360video and VR technologies. Sample Members of the European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development (CONCORD) were selected. The 2019 CONCORD list included 56 of Europe’s major humanitarian organizations, from human rights agencies (e.g. Save The Children International) to others focused on development (e.g. Action Aid) or even environmental stewardship (e.g. the World Wildlife Fund). The full list is available in ‘‘Appendix 1’’. Their websites and official profiles on Facebook and YouTube were searched for 360video content. The search was operationalised by introducing concrete key words in the search engines (360video, 360 video, 360, VR, Virtual Reality). As a result, the authors identified that only three of the 56 organizations had 360productions available on any of their main platforms: Save The Children, World Vision International (WVI) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Because of that limitation and thus to enrich the analysis, three recognised nonprofit organizations not on 1314 Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 123 CONCORD’s list were added to the sample because they had produced 360video and also have a presence in Europe: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Me ´decins Sans Frontie `res (MSF) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Therefore, this paper presents a case study based on six well-known humanitarian organizations to analyse how they leverage this new form of storytelling to disseminate their messages to a greater audience and effect societal change aimed at helping the other and the distant realities. As a result of the search, a database of immersive experiences produced by these six humanitarian agencies was created. Authors compiled videos from March to April 2019 (4 weeks) and found a total of 37 360videos published from December 2015 to April 2019. These are listed in Table 1. Method and Procedure To address the above-mentioned research questions, two methods have been used: First, a content analysis of the 360videos created and published by the nonprofit organizations; second, so as to make the results more robust, interviews were conducted with directors of communication or persons responsible for the digital strategies of the analysed organizations. A mixed methodology was implemented to achieve this paper’s goal of examining how and to what end some nonprofit organizations are using 360video to create content. The application of each technique is described below. Content Analysis and Code Development Having built the database, the authors proceeded to a content analysis in order to determine the main features of these specific productions, to obtain an overview of how humanitarian organizations leverage the technology’s potential for storytelling and spurring engagement with the viewing public and therefore to answer the above-mentioned RQs. Table 2(below) is the analysis matrix designed by taking into account the main characteristics of 360video news stories and previous studies on immersive journalism. Given the lack of studies on the use of 360videos in PR, the authors adapted journalistic-related analysis proposals to be able to study the aforementioned humanitarian aid productions, which, though not purely journalistic, are based on real stories and are published so as to share specific information about a particular reality. Thus, this analysis is focused on variables regarding the informative treatment of the videos: topic/issue, purpose of the piece, genre, user representation, role of viewer and storyteller, co-presence strategies, degree of interactivity, and use of multimedia modalities (text, visuals and audio resources). An extra variable related to location was introduced to identify how and where these nonprofit organizations disseminate their 360videos. All these elements have been adapted from previous research, as noted in Table 2. Although both authors helped design the analysis matrix, the content analysis of the 37 videos as well as the data processing with SPSS Statistics 25 was carried out by only one of the authors, as [anonymised] has prior experience in similar studies [anonymised]. Intra-coder reliability was tested by recoding a random subsample, corresponding to 20% of the data set. One of the authors coded the same data (subsample) twice at different times in order to check consistency (Wimmer and Dominick 2013). For that purpose, the Cohen’s Kappa coefficient was calculated (see ‘‘Appendix 2’’). Finally, the results show a perfect degree of consistency in almost all of the variables (k= 1), only one has a lower value (Visuals: others, k= 0.720), which nonetheless is still an adequate degree of consistency (Igartua 2006). Interviews Moreover, this article also draws on interviews with the heads of communication or digital strategies directors of the nonprofit organizations that have published at least one 360video on their main social media accounts (Facebook and YouTube) and/or general websites. Purposive sampling was used to select the interviewees based on their roles and functions within the organizations (Etikan et al. 2016). Even though several communications officers from various European national offices were contacted, only five responses from five nonprofit organizations were obtained, one of which stated that they would not be able to participate in this type of interview. The interviewees were asked about the objectives pursued by their organizations in producing 360videos, the effects of such videos on fundraising and donor support, the emotional impact on viewers, possible undesired or negative effects stemming from viewing the content, changes in the user’s engagement and relationship with the public, the production cost of 360videos, funding and partnerships with tech companies or VR producers, and their views on the different resources used (modalities, topics, storytelling and so on). The interviews were designed from the content analysis results. The questions for the structured interviews were designed from the results obtained in the content analysis. Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 1315 123 Quantitative Analysis and Results Volume: How Many Videos have Humanitarian Organizations Published? The first two videos found are dated 2 December 2015 and were published by WWF on Facebook and YouTube (Amazon! and Kingdom of Forests, respectively). As of April 2019, the endpoint of the data collection, the humanitarian organizations of the sample had produced and published several productions. Although the 2019 data are not complete, it is clear that from 2015 to 2016 there was a significant increase in 360content production. This rise demonstrates the interest of humanitarian organizations in experimenting with this nascent form of immersive storytelling (Fig. 1). The results show that humanitarian organizations published the greatest number of 360videos in 2016 and 2018 Table 1 The sample of 360videos. Source: authors’ compilation Title Organization Year Time Shukman’s Hoare IFCR 2018 0:01:30 Rescuing People in the Mediterranean IFCR 2016 0:04:07 Mediterranean Rescue operation IFCR 2016 0:01:34 Red Cross Launches First Search and Rescue Boat. Part 1 IFCR 2016 0:02:00 Red Cross Launches First Search and Rescue Boat. Part 2 IFCR 2016 0:00:35 Red Cross Launches First Search and Rescue Boat. Part 3 IFCR 2016 0:00:42 Red Cross Launches First Search and Rescue Boat. Part 4 IFCR 2016 0:01:16 Lives on Hold in Lebanon MSF 2018 0:08:01 We Are Rohingya MSF 2018 0:09:00 We Left Home Empty-Handed MSF 2017 0:07:41 Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley MSF 2016 0:02:17 Inside Tanzania MSF 2016 0:02:09 South Sudan: Forced to Live in Chaos and Poverty MSF 2016 0:04:52 Multiple Casualty Incident MSF 2017 0:02:56 We Fled A War, Then We Nearly Drowned MSF 2016 0:01:39 From the Syrian War to Europe’s Borders MSF 2016 0:04:53 Crisis in Borno State MSF 2016 0:00:47 Lift in the Time of Refuge UNHCR 2017 0:10:27 Rohingya Refugees Fleeing to Bangladesh UNHCR 2017 0:00:59 Step inside a Rohingya Tent Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Bangladesh UNHCR 2017 0:01:17 On Board Our Life-Saving Ship Save the Children 2016 0:00:54 7Stories for 7 Years—Stories after Syria WVI 2018 0:04:52 Najat’s Story after Syria WVI 2018 0:01:51 Yousef’s Story after Syria WVI 2018 0:01:43 Nisreen’s Story after Syria WVI 2018 0:01:57 Dreaming in Za’atari—Stories after Syria WVI 2018 0:05:18 Mahmoud—Stories after Syria WVI 2018 0:01:59 Marah—Syrian Refugee WVI 2018 0:02:10 Tabarak—Stories after Syria WVI 2018 0:02:02 Obada—Stories after Syria WVI 2018 0:01:37 The View from the Mountain WVI 2018 0:06:54 Ali’s Story WVI 2016 0:05:32 Hawaii WWF 2015 0:00:59 Amazon! WWF 2015 0:00:30 Kingdom of Forests WWF 2015 0:03:58 Pelagos WWF 2019 0:05:11 Elephant Gets up after Successful Collaring in Anti-Poaching Effort WWF 2018 0:00:44 1316 Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 123 (respectively, 37.8% and 37.8%). However, it should be noted that nine of the productions published in 2018 are part of Stories After Syria, a project led by WVI in partnership with Contrast VR, Al Jazeera’s virtual reality studio. These 360short documentaries were written, directed and filmed by seven displaced children in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp. Stories: Migration as the Main Interest Humanitarian organizations aim to show audiences the realities where they work to encourage people to support their social causes. In this regard, in most of the 360video productions analysed in this study, migration was the major topic (75.7%), migrants being understood as displaced Table 2 Analysis matrix designed for the study. Source: created by authors based on previous studies Stories Topic (Paı ´no et al. 2019; Benı ´tez and Herrera 2019; de Bruin et al. 2020) Purpose of the video (Benı ´tez and Herrera 2019) Genre/narrative form (Watson 2017; Jones 2017) Narrative aspects User representation in the scene Role of the user in the story (Dolan and Parets 2015; Barreda-A ´ngeles 2018) Storyteller: voiceover, journalist, source, character, text, etc. (Paı ´no-Ambrosio and Rodrı ´guez-Fidalgo 2019) Co-presence (Ijsselsteijn and Riva 2003; Nash 2018) Interactivity (Domı ´nguez 2017) Multimedia aspects (de Bruin et al. 2020) Text (subtitles, tides, headers, labels, credits and so on) Visuals (superimposed images, videos, icons, graphics and so on) Audio (music, dubbing, sound effects and so on) Location Distribution: web, Facebook, YouTube (Pe ´rez Seijo et al. 2018; Benı ´tez and Herrera 2019) Fig. 1 360videos published by humanitarian organizations per year (from 2015 to April 2019). Source: authors’ compilation Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 1317 123 people or refugees, as seen in productions such as Mediterranean Rescue Operation,Ali’s Story or We Are Rohingya. In the sample, climate change is present only in 10.8% and wildlife in 5.4%. Terrorist attacks (Multiple Casualty Incident), hunger (Crisis in Borno State) and arranged marriage (The View from The Mountain) are hardly addressed at all (2.7% in each case). Relation Between Volume and Topics We have crossed the variable year with the variable topic to figure out if there was any relation between the moment of publication and the issue (Fig. 2). Migration was the main topic of interest especially in 2016 and 2018, but also in 2017. The volume of 360videos that address migration in 2016 (35.1% of the sample) can be understood by referring to the social context. The European migrant crisis started in 2015, and the foray into immersive content began in earnest at the end of that year and beginning of 2016 (Doyle et al. 2016;Pe ´rez-Seijo and Lo ´pez-Garcı ´a2018). Except for 2015, when it was the only issue covered in spherical videos, climate change was rarely addressed. The videos that do address it were produced by the WWF. Three years later, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies would go on to publish Shukman’s House, a spherical video about the rise of heat in Hong Kong, possibly linked to climate change. The interest in animal life starts in 2018 and continues in 2019 with WWF. The Purpose Behind the 360  Videos We also examined the purpose of each immersive production in an attempt to better understand the perspective adopted to convey each story. Finally, we found that the main aim of more than half of the productions is to show a migrant reality (59.5%) to create social awareness. As we have observed, such productions are mostly documentarystyle and thus present a more developed storytelling compared to the remaining categories. Through this kind of content, NGOs aim to bring distant migrant realities closer to the user to raise awareness and to boost donation intention. Some examples are We Are Rohingya by MSF and Life in the time of Refuge by UNHCR, among others. The next most common major purpose of the storytelling (or the videos when storytelling is absent) is to observe an environment or scenario (24.3%) enabling users to explore freely in an evolving scene (what we have called ‘‘show simple’’ in Fig. 3), e.g. Mediterranean Rescue Operation by IFCR or in Elephant Gets Up After Successful Collaring in Anti-Poaching Effort published by WWF. The remaining immersive productions sought deliberately to: denounce facts or events (8.1%), e.g. the forced marriage of underage girls through the 360video film The View from the Mountain by WVI; to show in context (2.7%) how, for example, researchers collect biopsies of skin from whales in the WWF-produced documentary Pelagos; to simulate a situation (2.7%), as in Multiple Fig. 2 Overview of the evolution of topics by year, from 2015 to 1 April 2019. Source: authors’ compilation 1318 Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 123 Casualty Incident, in order to train MSF’s staff for example; and to allow users to visit remote locations (2.7%), as in WWF’s Kingdom of Forests, so as to understand the role of the Amazon in the Earth’s climate stability. Who and How: Form, Genre and Storyteller The vast majority of the videos (94.6%) consist entirely of real images. That is, while some productions include graphics or superimposed images, they include neither hybrid (combination of virtual reality and real-image footage) nor totally synthetic scenes. The remaining 5.4% are hybrid productions: on the one hand, We Are Rohingya (Me ´decins Sans Frontie `res 2018) includes a synthetic scene with a map that illustrates the displacement of the Rohingya people fleeing from Myanmar’s military repression; on the other hand, some scenes of Dreaming In Za’atari (from the project Stories after Syria by WVI and Contrast VR 2018) incorporate animated objects to illustrate the hopes, dreams and aspirations of each of the seven refugee children who appear in the documentary. Figure 4shows both examples. In terms of genre, 56.7% fall within a traditional one: 48.6% are documentary-style, e.g. Ali’s story by WVI, and only 8.1% are 360video reports, e.g. Step inside a Rohingya Tent Kutupalong Refugee Camp by UNHCR. The remaining productions do not fit in any conventional genres, so we have created some categories to better understand their format based on existing proposals such as those by Jones (2017) and Watson (2017). The most common are simple videos, i.e. with a basic narrative design, conceived to be distributed on social platforms like Facebook and YouTube (29.7% of the total sample, e.g. Mediterranean Rescue Operation by IFCR, which Jones called ‘‘social 360’’ and Watson refers to as ‘‘short-form 360’’ videos. Such videos lack a human narrator (sometimes text serves as a guide within the story), and thus emphasise seeing a specific reality through one’s own eyes; consequently, information and real testimonies take a back seat to exploration. The narrative form of the other videos does not fit in the features of the aforementioned genres since 5.4% have been self-labelled as virtual reality films, such as Life in the Time of Refuge by the UNCHR and The View from the Mountain by WVI. The remaining 8.1%, which we have referred to as ‘‘others’’, are composed of WWF’s short video preview of a longer immersive piece about the Amazon, a Save the Children’s donation campaign titled On Board Our Life-Saving Ship and a Doctors Without Borders’ real-image simulation called Multiple Casualty Incident, part of a training course for MSF medics and logisticians that simulates a multiple casualty incident. Fig. 3 Purpose of each 360video story. Source: authors’ compilation Fig. 4 Videos with synthetic elements. Source: screenshot of We Are Rohingya (MSF’s Facebook) and Dreaming in Za’atari (WVI’s YouTube) Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 1319 123 Variable Cohen’s Kappa Characteristics of the storyteller Storyteller 1.00 Gender of the storyteller 1.00 Underage storyteller 1.00 Role of the storyteller 1.00 User in the virtual environment User representation 1.00 Role of the user with a body 1.00 Role of the user without a body 1.00 User detected by characters 1.00 Copresence with the storyteller Face to face 1.00 Gazes 1.00 Direct references 1.00 Copresence with the source(s) Face to face 1.00 Gazes 1.00 Direct references 1.00 Interactivity 360view 1.00 Displayed menu 1.00 Basic options (pause, play, and so on) 1.00 Distribution Platforms 1.00 Audio Music 1.00 Kind of music 1.00 Music continuity 1.00 Voice dubbing 1.00 Sound effects 1.00 Visuals Visuals (general) 1.00 Image effects 1.00 Images/Pictures 1.00 Videos 1.00 Text Lower third graphics 1.00 Subtitles 1.00 Credits 1.00 Titles 1.00 Text 1.00 Others .72 Results of intra-coder reliability using Cohen’s Kappa Appendix 3 360video YouTube Facebook Shukman’s house – 232.000 Rescuing people in the Mediterranean 710 – Mediterranean Rescue operation 293 Red Cross launches first search and rescue boat. Part 1 240 Red Cross bunches first search and rescue boat. Part 2 67 Red Cross launches first search and rescue boat. Part 3 61 Red Cross launches first search and rescue boat. Pan 4 39 Lives on Hold in Lebanon 133.000 We Are Rohingya 100.000 We Left Home Empty-Handed 14.000 Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley 1.431 36.000 Inside Tanzania – 31.000 South Sudan: Forced to live in chaos and poverty 10.410 Multiple Casualty Incident 3.153 We Fled A War, Then We Nearly Drowned 8.952 From the Syrian War to Europe’s Borders 1.143 Crisis in Borno State 507 Life in the time of refuge 13.532 Rohingya Refugees Fleeing to Bangladesh 1.850 Step inside a Rohingya tent Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh 2.093 On Board Our Life-Saving Ship 1.531 7 Stories for 7 Years—Stories After Syria 1.630 Najat’s Story After Syria 82 618 Yousef’s Story After Syria 54 6.700 Nisreen’s Story After Syria 130 6.900 Dreaming In Za’atari—S tories After Syria 1.422 9.100 Mahmoud—Stories After Syria 746 Marah—Syrian Refugee 250 Tabarak—Stories After Syria 564 12.000 Obada—Stories After Syria 116 9.300 The View From The Mountain 999 Ali ‘s story 1.945 Hawaii 39.000 Amazon! 184.000 Kingdom of Forests 45.728 Pelagos 559 Elephant gets up after successful collaring in anti-poaching effort 1.524 Facebook and YouTube views until 4th June 2020 1326 Voluntas (2020) 31:1311–1329 123 References Abitbol, A., & Lee, S. 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