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Online Donations in the Wake of the Terrorist Attacks of Sept. 11
by Rick Christ I've been saying for over a year that online fundraising was something that had to wait until people established relationships with nonprofits online. I have cautioned my clients against spending precious online resources on fundraising. "Sure, put up a donation page," I told them, but don't spend lots of time asking for money. Instead, offer content on your site. DO the work of your nonprofit online: advocacy, education, communication, referral, empowerment... and gather a following that you can reach out to via e-mail to ask for further involvement, including fundraising, later. OK. I was wrong. By about $200 Million. After the attack, money started pouring into donation pages at a rate not seen since John McCain won in New Hampshire. Yahoo!, Amazon, and other for-profit organizations put up donation links, on their start pages, to the Red Cross site and others, and took donations through their own payment processing mechanisms. As of Sept. 27 the Red Cross has collected $6,808,808.04 online at Amazon alone, through 173,973 gifts (an average gift of $39.14, even though the default amount is $10 and there is a maximum of $100). The President himself urged the world to donate online through libertyunites.org, the quickly-put-together site by AOL Time Warner, Ebay, Amazon, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Yahoo!. And the total at this moment is $101,815,290. My personal favorite is the New York Firefighters 9-11 Disaster Relief Fund. I'm a life-long volunteer fireman and, growing up on Long Island, my heroes have always been New York firemen. At the Yahoo! site so far, $3,971,600.00 has been collected: from 47,290 donors (an average of $83.98). This fund was set up within hours of the collapse of the twin towers by the International Association of Fire Fighters (the union whose members include FDNY), Firehouse.com, and others. A link appeared within hours on Firehouse.com, the highest-traffic site for career and volunteer fire and rescue personnel. Observations: - The Yahoo! and Amazon sites are back to their normal start pages now. Amazon still has a banner link to the Red Cross (of course, even before the attacks, banner ad business was reportedly so slow that nonprofits could often pick up available ad space at little or no cost).
- Many of these gifts were the result of people going to the sites after being directed there by a wide variety of other media, including news broadcasts, and the even the President himself in his address to Congress.
- Most charities did little or no e-mail during the time immediately following the attacks, even to previous online donors. I did get an e-mail from the Red Cross, to whom I have donated online in the past on Friday, September 14, three days after the attacks. It was short, simple, and effective. (Read the full e-mail.) I have not received any e-mail from them since. I did not receive an e-mail from the Salvation Army until September 27. One charity, to whom I only gave once, online, had a letter in my mailbox about the attacks, and their response to them, only 8 days after the attacks. Why didn't they e-mail me instead? Not only would it be faster, but they have NO prior direct mail relationship with me. They do, however, have an online relationship with me.
- It doesn't take much to start online fundraising. FDNY.com, the "unofficial site of the New York Fire Department" simply changed its entire start page to reflect the helping.org start page.
- Virtually ALL the money given through third parties, like Amazon and Yahoo!, is not traceable back to the original donor by the charities. The privacy policies (and the desire of these firms to keep their own customer information private) prevented them from sharing donor information with the recipient charities. So, the charities have the money, but no way to go back to these donors to further a relationship. I wrote to Amazon to confirm this. In their response, I was told: "As our privacy policy states we will not share any of your personal information from the Amazon Honor System with other participants in the program, not even sites that you choose to support"
- My friend Kurt Hansen of donation processing ASP Charityweb.net (http://www.CharityWeb.net) says: "I've been running too hard to really stop and think about the impact. My clients are concerned about a drop off in overall giving, actually. But, I haven't seen that happening. The big spike passed about last Thursday (Sept. 27), but we are still running well above pre-attack donation levels. I'd say we're getting about 30% more donations per day, but that is a cursory examination, not a detailed one."
- Kurt also re-emphasizes what our colleague and friend Mark Rovner of CraverOnline (http://craveronline.com) has said - "The biggest indicator of whether a person will donate on-line is whether they have donated on-line before; I'd bet the universe of previous donors has just doubled." I think he's underestimating it a bit.
October 2001
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