As Hurricane Season Begins, Red Cross Applies Lessons of Katrina

The American Red Cross raised an extraordinary amount of money online for its Hurricane Katrina relief efforts:

$479-million so far. Now, at the start of another hurricane season, the Washington organization is working hard to build on its success on the Internet after disasters.

Online giving to the Red Cross during times of crisis has been growing since the late 1990s. The first big emergency for which electronic gifts were a significant portion of overall fund raising was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the organization collected $63.4-million online of the $1.1-billion it raised overall.

That disaster demonstrated how critical it was for the Red Cross to make sure its computer systems had the capacity to deal with enormous spikes in giving, says Tish Mokrzycki, the group’s manager for online fund raising.

“Operational systems became job one,” she says. But that focus on technological capacity, she says, meant that trying to build more-lasting relationships with emergency donors had to take a back seat.

When Web traffic and donation activity threatened to overwhelm the Red Cross’s systems in subsequent large-scale disasters, such as the Indian Ocean tsunamis in late 2004, and Hurricane Katrina last summer, the organization shifted some donors to Web sites that were accepting contributions on its behalf, such as Yahoo and MSN.

Ms. Mokrzycki says that being able to redirect the excess traffic is particularly important during fund-raising telethons, when online donations can surge to nearly 1,000 gifts per minute. It would be far too costly, she says, for the Red Cross to build and maintain a system that could handle that many donations, especially knowing that the capacity would only be needed occasionally.

“We are lucky to have great relationships with partners who say to us, ‘When can we flip the switch and help distribute some of the traffic?’” says Ms. Mokrzycki.

Cellphone Connections

After Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross was the beneficiary of two campaigns that allowed cellphone users to make small donations to relief efforts by sending a text message to a particular number. The gifts were added to customers’ regular phone bill.

The Text 2HELP campaign, run by a coalition of telecommunications companies, raised $115,000 and another conducted by Cingular brought in $316,000.

Ms. Mokrzycki believes that text messaging shows promise, particularly as a way to reach out to young people, and says the organization plans to use the technique again.

Since November, the Red Cross has been studying the giving patterns of 1.5 million donors who gave to the organization for the first time after Hurricane Katrina by making an online gift, and 100,000 donors who gave for the first time after the Indian Ocean tsunamis.

The goal of Project RED (Retain Episodic Donors) is to test which methods, such as phone, online, or postal appeals, work best to persuade a donor who gave in response to a disaster to make a second gift. So far, 1.3 percent of the group — nearly 21,000 donors — has made a donation in response to nondisaster appeals from the group.

Ms. Mokrzycki believes the final results of the study will show that the organization has a relatively small window in which to successfully solicit a second gift.

“Timing is important,” she says. “You want to definitely be converting and talking to them and maybe setting up the case for conversion right out of the gates.”

Before Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross hired an online fund-raising company, after years of using a donation system it built itself. The new system has given the organization greater flexibility in its Internet fund raising.

After the hurricane, the Red Cross was able to set up special donation sites for companies that wanted to encourage their employees to contribute to relief efforts, and it now allows donors to set up monthly gifts online. Ms. Mokrzycki says she can envision the Red Cross using the system to let supporters set up personal Web sites to raise money from friends and family members in the aftermath of a disaster.

Now the national organization is working with eight chapters to test the donation system before it promotes the approach throughout the Red Cross network.

Charities compete for donations, says Ms. Mokrzycki, and if local chapters don’t have a good way to deal with online donations, they might be left behind.

“People are getting very used to Pottery Barn purchase sites that work very well, so you get compared,” she says. “Unless you have that third big channel, you’re leaving money on the table.”