A Chain-Letter Reaction

“34 million friends” drive raises $2-million in overseas aid

At 3 o’clock in the morning, Jane Roberts had an idea. It was July 2002, and just a few days earlier, the Bush administration had announced that it would not release $34-million appropriated by Congress to sponsor the United Nations Population Fund, an agency of the United Nations that provides reproductive-health programs in more than 140 countries.

Although the agency does not provide abortions, its family-planning activities have long made it a target for anti-abortion activists. Its money was cut off while Ronald Reagan was president and remained so during George H.W. Bush’s term, but it was restored under President Bill Clinton. The current Bush administration eliminated federal financing of the agency after the U.S. State Department said that the Population Fund was indirectly supporting coercive abortions and involuntary sterilization programs in China, a charge that the agency denied.

Ms. Roberts, a 60-year-old retired teacher and longtime activist for women’s issues, was appalled by the administration’s decision. She believed that it would have a real human cost — the Population Fund estimates that the money could have prevented two million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced abortions, 77,000 infant and child deaths, and 4,700 maternal deaths worldwide. So she tossed and turned that summer night in her home in Redlands, Calif., trying to figure out what to do.

Suddenly, it came to her: Why not find a way to replace the $34-million that the U.S. government had cut? What if she could, as she put it, create her own “teeny tiny foreign policy” and raise $1 from 34 million people? She felt certain that at least that many people felt as upset about the administration’s decision as she did. If she sent an e-mail message out to a few hundred people, she reasoned, and everyone sent it to 10 others, and they sent it to 10 others, and so on, she might be able to touch off a chain effect.

A Similar Vision

As it turned out, at just about the same time, a total stranger had the same brainstorm. Lois Abraham, 70, a lawyer in Taos, N.M., had been following the Population Fund controversy. She also had the idea to use a chain-style e-mail letter to raise $1 from 34 million people to replace the money. “When Bush pulled the money, I was angry,” she says. “The e-mail campaign was an idea that germinated from that anger. Doing nothing became unacceptable, and I had received some chain-letter e-mails, some of them more than once, so I knew that it might work.”

Two women who had never met, one improbable idea to raise $1 from 34 million people using e-mail: In an era of ever-increasing spam, it sounded like an idea destined to add up to zero. And yet, two years later, Ms. Roberts and Ms. Abraham’s brainstorm, or 34 Million Friends of UNFPA, as it has come to be known, has turned into a most successful, if unusual, fund-raising campaign. (The United Nations Population Fund used to be called the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, or the UNFPA. Although the name has changed, the abbreviation used to describe it has not.)

To date, 34 Million Friends of UNFPA has raised nearly $2-million, through the charity that supports the agency’s efforts in this country, the U.S. Committee for United Nations Population Fund, in New York. Not only has the campaign raised money, but the 34 Million Friends’ methods also pushed both the U.N. agency and the charity that works with it into uncharted fund-raising territory. Moreover, it has helped bolster the United Nations’ efforts to improve reproductive-health care in developing countries and offers a number of lessons for fund raisers about what causes a grass-roots campaign to grow.

Humble Beginnings

Ms. Roberts and Ms. Abraham — unaware of each other’s existence — independently started the still-unnamed campaign in August 2002. Ms. Roberts began by writing a check to the U.S. Committee for United Nations Population Fund, something that she did every year. In addition to a check for $500, she tucked a dollar bill into the envelope, along with a note that she would be encouraging others to give a dollar too — which sounded great to the U.S. Committee, says John Corwin, who is currently the committee’s interim president. “It fits very nicely with our mission, which is advocacy education and fund raising for the UNFPA,” he says.

Then Ms. Roberts sent e-mail messages to everyone in her many circles: personal friends, acquaintances from environmental and educational groups, national women’s organizations, tennis and golf buddies, book-club members. “I really thought this had possibilities,” says Ms. Roberts.

‘A Leap of Faith’

Ms. Abraham started by calling the United Nations Population Fund. Her call was fielded by Vernon Mack, chief of the Resource Mobilization Branch. Ms. Abraham described her idea, and wanted to know whether the agency could receive donations from individuals. Up to that point, Mr. Mack says, neither the Population Fund nor the U.S. Committee, which are supported primarily by governments, had tried to raise funds from individuals.

Ms. Abraham “explained to me what she wanted to do,” Mr. Mack says, “and I thought to myself, now isn’t that interesting? But frankly I didn’t think it was going to amount to much.”

He asked her to send a draft of the e-mail letter that she wanted to distribute, and he mulled a logistical question, the first of many: How would the United Nations Population Fund and the U.S. Committee acknowledge any donors who responded to Ms. Abraham’s solicitation? He wanted to send a letter of thanks, but then realized it wouldn’t be cost efficient. Ultimately, he suggested adding a simple instruction to Ms. Abraham’s e-mail message: Donors should wrap their dollar bill in a piece of paper, and then write their name on that paper if they wanted to be acknowledged on the Population Fund’s Web site.

And with that, despite some reservations because Ms. Abraham was a stranger to him, he blessed the project. “I took a leap of faith,” he says. He realized that the campaign presented a very low risk to the Population Fund and the U.S. Committee, since the e-mail messages were not marked as official communications from either organization. If it didn’t work out, he thought, no harm done.

The Plans Converge

News of Ms. Abraham’s and Ms. Roberts’s separate plans surfaced at the next joint weekly meeting held by the United Nations Population Fund and the U.S. Committee, recalls Mari Tikkanen, resource mobilization officer at the Population Fund. Because the two women had uncannily hatched the same idea simultaneously, U.N. officials initially thought that the two women were the same person, Ms. Tikkanen says, despite their different names and locales.

Soon Ms. Roberts and Ms. Abraham were introduced, over the telephone. Ms. Abraham says she was surprised to hear about another person trying to do the same thing as she, and was mostly pleased.

“I did have one worry, and that is probably because I am a control freak,” she recalls. “I was very set on the message. To me, it had to be heavy on the cause, light on the politics. That’s not because I am not politically engaged — I am — but because I did not want to turn off potential ‘friends’ who might be Bush partisans but also would support UNFPA and the work it does. My worry was that I might not be able to control the message.”

Her worries were unfounded, however. “It turned out that Jane and I naturally complemented one another’s efforts and ideas,” she says. The retired Ms. Roberts was able to devote time to public speaking, for example, while Ms. Abraham, still working, could not. And the pair were able to reach very different groups of people, adds Ms. Roberts. “Lois has a different network than I do, through her work as an attorney,” she says. “Two weeks after she started, her e-mail’s going around the World Bank, for goodness sake!”

‘A Great Problem to Have’

The e-mail solicitations started to do their work, and the donations came in slowly — at first, says Ms. Tikkanen, who was tapped to oversee the campaign’s logistics. Envelopes with letters and gifts responding to the e-mail messages were routed to her office, and within the next few weeks she coined the name “34 Million Friends.”

Then, by early fall 2002, the momentum started to grow. “Our mail unit started bringing buckets of letters, literally,” she says. “Soon we were getting four big baskets a day.”

It started to dawn on everyone that the 34 Million Friends campaign was taking off. “We never ever expected such incredible response,” says Micol Zarb, media officer at the United Nations Population Fund. “There are so many people sending around e-mails to each other, Here’s a good cause, sign your name onto this petition,” she says. “In the age of the Internet, there’s just so much information overload. We never really expected it would spread as quickly as it did, so we had to quickly create a system to respond to all of these envelopes, all of the money, and all of the support. It’s a great problem to have.”

But it was a problem nonetheless, and Ms. Tikkanen was charged with solving it. First, she had to figure out how to get all of those envelopes opened. She asked Population Fund staff members to volunteer, and they gave their lunch hours, or time after work. She found no shortage of helpers, she says, because most donors included a letter with their donation expressing support for the organization. “It sounds so corny, but reading those letters — really it was so moving, and people were really motivated by it,” she says. “In any organization, you’re sometimes removed from what you do, so it’s good to be reminded.”

Ms. Tikkanen designed a system to make sure that the money was properly handled, she says. All envelopes were opened the day they were received, and each was checked by three volunteers. Since the offices lacked a safe, the money was stored in a locked cupboard in Mr. Mack’s office.

The Price of Fame

While the cash-counting system proved adequate, using the team of volunteers turned out to be only a temporary measure. By October 2002, the campaign was starting to get news-media attention. Several prominent newspaper columnists wrote about the campaign, says Ms. Zarb, including Molly Ivins and Ellen Goodman, as did magazines such as Ms., Marie Claire, and O, the Oprah Magazine. The effect of the coverage was substantial: Before Ms. Ivins’s column on the campaign, the Population Fund was receiving 100 letters a day, says Ms. Zarb. After the column ran in October, she says, the number increased to 500 letters a day. After Ms. Goodman’s column appeared in December, that number jumped to 1,000 daily.

Eventually, about $60,000 a week poured into the United Nations Population Fund and the U.S. Committee headquarters, in thousands of letters. (Many donors gave more than $1.) “It became clear that we needed to be opening full time,” says Ms. Tikkanen.

She also needed to get a safe, and an armored car to bring the money to the bank, which was six blocks away. The staff members, she says, had been walking the money over to the bank in teams of four, varying their routes to deter potential thieves. “It was a safety issue,” she says. “It was an open campaign, and it was evident that we had cash coming into the office.”

The U.N. Foundation, a grant-making organization in Washington founded in 1997 with a $1-billion gift from the businessman Ted Turner, stepped in, and provided a grant of $49,960 to pay for a safe and an armored car. “That was a great relief,” says Ms. Tikkanen. The grant also paid for a computer, and for temporary workers and interns to process donations.

By May 2003, the campaign had raised its first million dollars, and the U.N. Foundation made another grant to the project — 25 cents for every dollar raised, or $250,000. The money was used to pay for Good Works, a consulting company in Boulder, Colo., to take over the day-to-day operations of the campaign, which it did in September.

“This was not something we could have continued to take care of,” says Ms. Tikkanen. “We’re not set up for that.” Even though it was a lot of extra work, she says that she was sorry to see the campaign go: “That year that it lasted here, within us, it was just uplifting for everyone.”

Analyzing Success

Now, two years since the campaign began, it is closing in on the $2-million mark. Ms. Abraham points to the campaign’s simplicity and the small amount it requested from donors for its success. “The initial e-mail asked for $1. Just about anyone can do $1,” she says. “Since I believe that getting people to focus on the issue was as important as the amount of money they donated, I viewed the small ask as a benefit. Part of the benefit was that we would not be competing for money that people normally give to other causes.”

A concrete issue at its core also helped 34 Million Friends take off, says Ms. Zarb. “I think it’s something that we can all relate to,” she says.

The campaign now focuses, via its Web site (which also accepts online donations), on letting donors know what their gifts have accomplished. For example, using funds from the 34 Million Friends campaign, the Population Fund is providing ambulances to take women to hospitals in Rwanda.

It is also enabling the purchase of 80 motor scooters for midwives, so that they can reach women in remote areas in East Timor. And the money has helped to train 1,000 health assistants in basic emergency obstetric care in Eritrea. Half of the funds raised by the campaign are going toward programs designed to treat obstetric fistula, a pregnancy-related disability, in six countries.

The Population Fund and the U.S. Committee have newfound appreciation of the power of the individual, says Mr. Corwin. In fact, forthcoming campaigns will focus on individual donors and action, says Ms. Tikkanen. In a new effort on obstetric fistula, for example, “we have a list of things individuals can do to support the obstetrics fistula campaign, which is entirely something we’ve learned from the 34 Million Friends campaign,” she says.

The 34 Million Friends donor list is an invaluable database, she says — albeit one that is prevented by its privacy guarantee from being shared with other charities. But more than being a substantial list of names, she adds, “we know the support is out there for our work, and how to respond, how to make the most of that goodwill for this cause. It’s given us confidence.”

Of course, for Ms. Roberts and Ms. Abraham, the work is far from done. They still have $32-million more before they will hit their goal. So even though the campaign is now administered by Good Works, both women continue to drum up support and interest in the cause. Ms. Roberts, for example, keeps a rigorous speaking schedule on the college circuit, while Ms. Abraham despairs of ever keeping track of all of the e-mail solicitations that she still needs to send.

It’s not just about the money, but also about the message that the money is sending, says Ms. Roberts. “I ache to see that total go up,” she says. “I want the world to know that we Americans are a generous, good people and that we care. To me, those dollars are sending that message.”