Gifts are pouring in to the American Red Cross in the wake of last
week's terrorist attacks, with an unprecedented amount of money coming
in online.
In the eight days following the disaster on September 11, the Red Cross
raised $129-million, or about 20 percent of the $637-million that the
charity raised last year from private sources.
By comparison, in April 1995 the Red Cross raised $5-million in the week
after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City, which before the World Trade Center collapse had been the worst
terrorist attack on American soil.
The amount of money that has been donated online to the Red Cross after
this month's terrorist attacks, more than $46-million so far, dwarfs all
previous online fund-raising efforts. 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.
Internet fund raising first became an important part of the Red Cross's
disaster-relief fund raising during the war in Kosovo in April 1999.
That month, the Red Cross accepted $1.2-million in online gifts,
compared to a total of $172,000 in all of 1998. Later that year, the
charity raised more than $400,000 online in the first four days after
the earthquake that devastated Turkey in August.
In the days following the attacks in New York, Washington, and
Pennsylvania, the large number of visitors to the Red Cross Web site
strained the capacity of the charity's server, but with the help of
several technology companies, the Red Cross has been able 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 the
number of visitors may have even been 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 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 Red Cross Web 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 system that
distributes 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.