December 31, 2013 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Aid for Africa, a coalition of small American charities, didn’t set out to reap financial benefit from a racist comment that attracted global attention just before the Christmas holiday.
But it has ended up gaining lots of donations nonetheless, in part because of quick thinking by one of its supporters after an unusual chain of events.
The action started a few days before the holiday, when Justine Sacco, a prominent public-relations executive, was boarding a flight from London to Cape Town, South Africa. She wrote a tweet that stunned many readers: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
While Ms. Sacco was flying, Twitter and other social networks were erupting with scorn for her comments, and her employer, IAC—the Internet media company owned by the entertainment executive and philanthropist Barry Diller—fired her after it learned about the tweet.
As those events were unfolding, Aid for Africa didn’t know that someone created the website justinesacco.com and redirected all visitors to AidforAfrica.org, which accepts donations and channels them to charities that work on a range of issues in Africa, including education, health care, and wildlife conservation.
The charity doesn’t know who set up the site, and Internet registration records don’t show who it was either.
Barbara Alison Rose, Aid for Africa’s executive director, says that soon after the controversial tweet was posted, she noticed more donations coming to her organization than usual. Usually the group gets three or four donations a day; that many were coming in hourly, she says, in the weekend before Christmas.
More are coming in a week later, although Ms. Rose declined to disclose how much has been raised.
She says once the charity realized what was happening, it decided it might as well promote the idea of giving through the Sacco site and started sending its own tweets, including one that said, “Keep up the momentum! Donate at http://justinesacco.com to help the people of Sub Saharan Africa help themselves.”
The fundraising appeal got so much attention it prompted Donald Trump to jump into the fray and show his support for Aid for Africa. He tweeted, using the popular hashtag that resulted from the kerfuffle: “#HasJustineLandedYet—Justine, what the hell are you doing, are you crazy? Not nice or fair! I will support @AidforAfrica. Justine is FIRED!”
Ms. Rose says as far as she knows, the charity has yet to receive a check from Mr. Trump. “We haven’t seen anything yet,” she said.
But what Ms. Rose wants to find out most is the identity of the online guru who moved so quickly to capitalize on the attention to Ms. Sacco.
“We would love to know who created the page,” Ms. Rose says. “I think it’s fascinating. Clearly, it was someone who loves our work.”
