Online Giving Soars as Donors Turn to the Internet Following Attacks

Major disasters are almost always followed by a rush of charitable giving.

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But the response after the September 11 terrorist attacks was unusual not only in its vast extent, but also in the number of immediate charitable donations made online.

Contributions made in the days following the attacks dwarfed all previous Internet fund-raising campaigns. More than $70-million of the $676-million in contributions to relief efforts following the terrorist attacks have come in online.

The American Red Cross, the biggest recipient, reported $60-million in online gifts as of last week, just two weeks after the disasters. The online figure accounted for almost 30 percent of the $211-million total raised during that time.

Before this year, the most money any charity had ever raised online in a single year was the $2.7-million the Red Cross raised in 1999, which included donations for the relief efforts in Kosovo.

Final totals are not yet available for the Red Cross's 2001 fiscal year, but in the first 10 months -- July 2000 through April of this year -- the Red Cross raised $3.5-million through the Internet, with much of that amount coming in response to earthquakes in India and Central America.

Among the other organizations and relief funds that have raised significant amounts of money online:

• The September 11th Fund (at http://www.september11fund.com,) created by the United Way of New York City and the New York Community Trust, has raised $8-million online, out of the $120-million total it had brought in as of last week.

• The Salvation Army (http://www.salvationarmy.org) has raised more than $1.6-million in Internet gifts, out of a total $21-million raised so far.

• Catholic Charities USA saw $300,000 of the $1-million it has raised come in through its Web site (http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org). The group's online fund raising for all of 2000 totaled only $75,000.

In the days following the attacks, the Red Cross's online fund-raising effort was almost tripped up by its own success. The large number of visitors to its Web site strained the capacity of the charity's server, and the organization, with the help of several technology companies, had to scramble to strengthen its Web infrastructure to deal with the increased traffic.

Phil Zepeda, the charity's director of online media, estimates that the number of people coming to the Red Cross Web site the day of the attacks was about 50 times higher than on a regular day. He believes that usage may have been even higher on following days, but doesn't know for sure because the overwhelming number of visitors led to unreliable Web-traffic reports.

To help ease the burden on its Web server, the Red Cross started directing visitors who wanted to make a contribution to an online-donation system Yahoo had set up on its Web site. Other companies, including Amazon.com, AOL Time Warner, PayPal.com, and Wells Fargo Bank, also started to collect donations on their Web sites on behalf of the Red Cross.

Before the disaster, the Red Cross site was housed on one server. But, working around the clock for three days with the help of systems engineers and architects from the Microsoft Corporation and from Cisco Systems, the charity's information-systems department developed a way to distribute Web traffic evenly to multiple servers that each house a full copy of the Web site.

"It was difficult, and it was a little slow, but RedCross.org remained open, which is phenomenal," says Mr. Zepeda.

The Salvation Army, which had not relied heavily on the Internet in its fund raising after previous disasters, has taken a more active approach since the terrorist attacks.

The charity convinced more than 2,200 high-profile Web sites -- including Excite, USA Today, and Yahoo -- to run free banner advertisements that link to a fund-raising site operated by Yahoo on behalf of the Salvation Army.

It also sent e-mail fund-raising appeals to six million people using an e-mail list donated by MatchLogic, an online marketing company in Westminster, Colo. Another e-mail campaign asked more than 130,000 Web masters at small or regional Web sites to add a Salvation Army button to their home page.

Technology companies have played a major role in helping raise money for many of the charities and relief funds responding to the tragedy.

After raising more than $57-million through their own Web sites, six Internet companies -- Amazon.com, AOL Time Warner, Cisco Systems, eBay, Microsoft, and Yahoo -- joined together to form the American Liberty Partnership. President Bush announced the creation of the partnership's Liberty Unites Web site (http://www.libertyunites.org) in a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden a week after the attacks.

EBay has also started Auction for America (http://pages.ebay.com/auctionforamerica), an online benefit auction with the goal of raising $100-million in 100 days, which is being run separately from the American Liberty Partnership project. Both individuals and companies can contribute items to the auction. EBay has waived its listing fees and commissions for any item sold as part of the auction. Several banks and credit-card companies have also waived credit-card processing fees for purchases made as part of the auction. The September 11th Fund will be the auction's primary beneficiary.

Jim Griffith, spokesperson for eBay, says that in the first 24 hours after the auction's official start, the number of items included jumped from 5,000 to 15,000. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is contributing a baseball signed by New York Yankees star Yogi Berra, and New York Gov. George Pataki is donating a photograph of himself with Joe DiMaggio, another Yankee legend, riding together in a convertible during a ticker-tape parade.

Nonprofit technology observers are quick to point out that the extraordinary amounts of money being raised online are the result of the extraordinary nature of the disaster.

But Nick Allen, president of Donordigital.com, a technology consulting company in Berkeley, Calif., believes that charities not involved in the relief efforts can take some of the approaches used by the Red Cross and others and apply them locally.

"There are a lot of much smaller things than this large-scale disaster that would drive people to give," he says. For instance, he suggests, a homeless shelter could ask local newspapers and television stations to run banner advertisements on their Web sites linking to the charity in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.

Mark Rovner, senior vice president at Craver, Mathews, Smith & Company, on the other hand, doubts that there is much that organizations not involved in relief can learn from the current situation. Still, he says that the record amounts of money being collected online may have long-term implications for all Internet fund raising, by expanding the pool of potential online donors.

"I think it is fair to guess that the past weeks have seen people making online donations for the first time," he says. "That may mean that as things settle down and fund raising picks back up again, the universe for online fund raising may be substantially larger."