Slashdot Mirror
Digital Fundraising Booms For Haiti Relief
It seems that a recent digital fundraising drive for Haiti relief has stunned organizers at the Red Cross and White House. As of the last tally on Friday the campaign was at well over $8 million. "Earlier Thursday, when the Red Cross topped $3 million in text and social media donations — it hit nearly $40 million from all sources by late Thursday — spokesman Jonathan Aiken described it as 'a phenomenal number that's never been achieved before. People text up to three times at 10 bucks a pop,' Aiken said. 'You're talking about roughly 300,000 people actually spontaneously deciding, "I can spare $10 for this." And that's remarkable.' As of late Thursday, more than half of all donations to the Red Cross's Haiti relief effort had been received online, according to a news release.
it seems i may have underestimated you.
It is easier to get 4 million people to give $10 then it is to get 4,000 people to give $10,000. But it takes a wide spread publicity campaign, which the networks are giving away for free. By the way, if every person in the world sends me 1 penny (just ONE penny) via paypal to me at gurps_npc (at) hotmail.com, then I will be very happy.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Yes there is a way to follow the money. I'm 95% certain that the Red Cross is still using Raisers Edge to track their fund raising. It's a trivial matter to generate a campaign report that details who gave the money and what fund it went to. As far as tracking it from the fund to actual recipient, I think you're going to find that it gets wasted in the same way most charitable donations get wasted. Well over 50% of the money gets consumed in administrative overhead.
While I can certainly agree with donating to charity to help people who have hit unexpected hard times, the root cause of the scale of the crisis is the sheer fact that the country lives in pre-industrial conditions under an oppressive, corrupt government, which ultimately means that massive numbers of people are living in concentrated areas, in buildings unfit for handling disasters. An earthquake of the exact same magnitude - or greater - in an equally populated area of the US, would have suffered a fraction of the casualties. So ultimately, the cure to their woes is not foreign aid, but more individual freedom, less government corruption, and the development of industry and improvement in living standards, which will culminate in safer buildings and residences.
I donated to Mercy Corps the old fashioned way, by entering a credit card number into a website.
Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin has posted some interesting stuff on Boing Boing. It seems that enough of the high-techie infrastructure survived to allow people to keep in touch and look for lost relatives:
The internet is a vital form of communication, as are cellphones—when they work—and she is seeing people in Haiti using social networking services as a means to try and locate missing loved ones within Haiti. The environment is so chaotic and roads so badly damaged that even in-country, mobile technology and web-based social networking services like Facebook are playing a vital role in the reconnection process. Don't assume that because Haiti is so poor, nobody's using the internet. She says cell service has been spotty, with certain carriers performing better than others. She connected to us using WIMAX, and the degree to which that service has performed during the disaster makes her a real believer in the promise of that particular wireless technology.
AIDG's Catherine Lainé, live from Haiti (BB Video)
Update from Doctors Without Borders team in Port-au-Prince (Cool inflatable MASH-like field hospital!)
A second article states that it usually takes 90 days for the donation to be transferred.
While the phone companies are looking at how to speed this up, am I the only one who believes that this would be a good way for some banks to earn back some credibility? It seems like they could give the Red Cross a 90 day loan to give them the money today, at 0%. Makes them look really good.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I think you're going to find that it gets wasted in the same way most charitable donations get wasted. Well over 50% of the money gets consumed in administrative overhead.
The redcross is not most charities; they have a very good reputation for low overhead. Katrina lost only 9% of your donation to overhead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross. The red cross is one of the few charities I still donate to because of their low overhead costs.
And GP, the red cross has been around since before 1900 and whatever slip ups they might be accused of, people are still donating.
Uh, they need things like water *yesterday*, but I'm not sure if any amount of money can get the basics they need in time, only so many flights can land at the airport per day (and they can't fly in the big boys like the C5 Galaxy) and the port has no cranes to unload ships. Supplying water to ~3.2M people is a huge order even with nearly unlimited resources, for instance the Nimitz class carrier the navy brought to the area can make ~400k gallons of fresh water a day, but that's just a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I run the Interactive department for one of the key non-profits involved in this effort. We've been working around the clock since the earthquake to set up online donations, informational pages, disaster-coordination tools like haiti.ushahidi.com, and mobile giving. 100% of the money is going to Haiti, starting tonight (as credit card transactions have cleared.) No one is taking "administrative fees."
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
So, my question to you is: Can you volunteer full time, half time? Specially right know, who can afford to leave their jobs for weeks to go to Haiti to volunteer full time?
10% overhead is a very reasonable figure if we cannot bother to get our butts out of the couch and go there ourselves.
At times like these it really makes you proud to be an American to see the great amount of donations going out even in this terrible economy and good to see people have sympathy for others.
Donations by private Americans a lot of the time donate more than a lot of countries combined but make sure you donate to a reputable charity because online fraud is at an all time high after incidents like these.
I have two family members who are R.N.'s and a neighbor on wait with the Orange County, CA disaster team, cash is one of the best things you can donate because it costs so much to transport the material.
UPS is shipping anything for free under 50lbs
$4 million so far donated to the Salvation Army by text
$8 million donated to the state department by text
and now I am sure the Red Cross will step it up with this
Charitable organizations, like any organization, need permanent staff to operate efficiently. You might get college kids to work for you over the summer for nothing but room and board, but no one will work for you on any kind of long-term basis for that. If you want long-term employees, particularly skilled employees, you have to pay for them. Sure, they might work for you for less than they could get in the private sector (and many do), but they still need money to feed their own families.
Saying you refuse to give to any charities because there may be some amount of waste in them is just a way for you to rationalize your own selfishness. The fact is these organizations do far more good than any of us would be capable of or willing to do on our own. Because we won't or can't go out and dig new wells in Africa or help rebuild houses in Haiti or any of the other things these charities do, we give money to them to help them do it instead. They in turn hire people who know how to do this stuff in the most effective and efficient way possible.
That may or may not be an especially good idea.
There are definitely "charities" that, even if not total scams, spend far too much on paying their CEOs and executive directors and so forth, and sending them on important fact finding missions to poor(but pleasantly sunny) places. You definitely want to avoid those.
However, the point of a charity is not to assemble the greatest concentration of self-sacrificing moral goodness available; but to turn donations(in dollars or in kind) into results that match the stated goal of the charity. The measure of a charity's efficiency, and thus its worth as a possible donation recipient, is determined by how efficiently it does so. There are most likely some cases where volunteers are, in fact, the most efficient means. There are others where expensive experts are, in all likelihood, the most efficient.
You donate to a charity because you want your money to effect its goals, whether the goals are pulling people out of the rubble, vaccinating children, reducing unplanned pregnancies, filing FOIA requests, or whatever. Why judge them on how they distribute their resources, rather than on how efficiently they achieve their results?
You want to use guns to take money away from people and give it to other people, according to your whims, and that's what you call "fair"?
These people seem to disagree with you. To get on this list, 75% or
more has to go to program services.
http://www.charitywatch.org/hottopics/Haiti.html
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Most people didn't have water **before** the quake. The same goes for electrical power. It's only the well-to-do Haitians (probably having relatives in the USA to send money) who are experiencing this for the first time.
Lots of Haitians normally use the "flying toilet". You poop in an old plastic bag, step outside, and throw it as far as you can. I am not kidding. It's popular in Kenya too.
There is a reasonable argument that Haiti is better off than a place like post-Katrina New Orleans. No running water? Cool, the house didn't have a sink or toilet anyway!