Chronicle of Philanthropy Reports Latest on Giving For Katrina Relief

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has an excellent article reporting statistics on how much charities have raised in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A couple of things that jumped out at me as someone who helps nonprofits with online fundraising:

• More than half of the money that the Red Cross raised in the first 10 days was online.
• The Baton Rouge Area Foundation had to get a new online donation processing engine because the one they had couldn’t handle the huge volume of online donations.
• About half of the money AmeriCares has raised so far has come in online. They sent an e-mail out to 70,000 of their donors.

Unfortunately, the article says that the pace of giving is already starting to slow down. Much more is still needed.

You can read the full artilce here:

http://philanthropy.com/free/update/2005/09/2005090801.htm

I believe that the web can be a very powerful fundraising tool. Those organizations that acted quickly to communicate how their organization was involved in responding to this unprecedented tragedy and had robust tools and a plan in place to use the web effectively are having the greatest success with online fundraising efforts.