Relief Charities Test Ways to Keep Tsunami Donors

In the days following the December 26 earthquake and tsunamis that devastated South Asia, online contributions

poured in to international relief charities. As 2004 came to an end, some aid organizations found that their Web sites were collecting more money in one day than they had the previous year.

On each of the last two days of the year, CARE USA, an international relief group in Atlanta, received Internet gifts totaling $3.5-million, compared with the $841,000 the charity raised online in the 2004 fiscal year.

“The outpouring of support, especially on the Web, exceeded by orders of magnitude anything that had ever happened before,” says Toby A. Smith, the organization’s Internet strategist. In the days immediately after the disaster, he notes, electronic donations made up roughly 50 percent of the money CARE was raising for its relief efforts.

All told, 22 charities that responded to the disaster raised a total of $1.27-billion, $311.4-million of which came in through the Internet.

The American National Red Cross, in Washington, raised the most money, both on the Web and overall. Of the $532-million the organization received after the disaster, $116.5-million came in through its Web site and $23-million was donated online through Amazon.com and Yahoo.

In contrast, Internet contributions accounted for only $65.9-million of the nearly $1-billion the American Red Cross collected after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Spreading the Word

In addition to being a source of donations, the Internet also proved to be an important medium for keeping charities’ supporters up-to-date on the progress of the relief efforts.

Soon after the tsunamis hit, the International Rescue Committee, in New York, realized that if it wanted to get the freshest information out to the public, it wouldn’t be able to follow its usual, multistep communications procedure, says Mark R. Collins, the group’s deputy vice president for development. So the organization started a Web log that its workers in South Asia could use to upload digital photographs and write about their work.

The information that was posted to the Web site was different from the organization’s typical communication in that it was more immediate and often focused on a particular slice of its work, says Mr. Collins. A health-care worker, for example, could write about her workday without giving a comprehensive description of everything her program accomplishes.

Says Mr. Collins: “We’ve gotten a much more rich mix of information onto the Web site by loosening up a little bit.”

Just two weeks after the disaster, World Vision USA, in Federal Way, Wash., was able to send a video e-mail to donors who had made an online gift to show them how their dollars were being used.

In comparison, someone who made an online gift after the earthquake in Gujarat, India, in January 2001 would have received updates in the postal mail 30 to 45 days after the disaster, and again one year later.

New Contributors

The Web was also popular with first-time donors. Out of all the new donors who made tsunami-relief donations to Samaritan’s Purse, in Boone, N.C., 88 percent made their gifts online.

And for many groups, new donors accounted for the lion’s share of online contributions. Doctors Without Borders, in New York, received online contributions from 108,000 people, only 10,000 of whom were previous donors.

As they do after every major crisis, fund raisers are struggling to persuade those emergency donors to become continuing supporters, something that is often difficult to do. The new wrinkle after the tsunamis is whether the Internet can help make it easier.

Atul Tandon, a senior fund raiser at World Vision, says it’s too soon to tell. “Our hope would be that the numbers will be better,” he says.

To that end, the organization sent an e-mail survey to the 89,042 donors who made online donations to ask them how they would like to interact with World Vision — just via e-mail, or by some combination of e-mail, phone, and postal mail — and whether they would like to learn about the organization’s other projects as well as tsunami-relief efforts.

Mixing Approaches

Doctors Without Borders is trying to figure out the best way to mix e-mail and direct mail as it reaches out to new donors.

This month, the organization will split its list of new online donors into three sections. One group will receive an e-mail solicitation; another will receive a postal appeal. The third group will receive both a postal appeal and an e-mail alert, letting them know that the direct mail is on the way.

In the weeks after the tsunami, 2,500 people signed up through Mercy Corps’s Web site to become monthly donors, almost tripling the number of online donors who give 12 times a year.

The Portland, Ore., group continues to promote the option to people who made one-time gifts for relief efforts, which has resulted in 500 additional monthly contributors.

In April, the organization added an online presentation, “The Third Wave,” to its Web site (http://www.mercycorps.org/thirdwave), which uses photographs and audio narration to talk about Mercy Corps’s rebuilding efforts.

The presentation, which the charity announced via e-mail, suggests donation amounts at a wide variety of levels to support its five main areas of rebuilding work, such as a $450 contribution that could help repair a damaged fishing boat, or a $45 gift to help desalinate a farm.

Mercy Corps has raised $13-million on the Internet for its relief efforts, more than the $10-million the organization raised from private sources in total — online and offline — for all of 2003. The biggest lesson the charity has drawn from its online experience: Be prepared.

“We were operating at over 1,000 times our normal level both on Web-site visitors and donations,” says Tanya Zumach, the organization’s Web marketing manager. “Because we had upgraded our servers, we were really ready.”

Sharnell Bryan contributed to this article.

TSUNAMI DONATIONS: HOW MUCH WAS RAISED ONLINE