Outlook for Online Donations Is Cloudy, Experts Say

The extraordinary amount of money relief charities raised online after September’s terrorist attacks — more than $215-million of the more than $2-billion collected altogether — raises as many questions about the future of online fund raising as it answers, experts said at the third annual e-Philanthropy Conference here.

The biggest question, said David Eisner, senior vice president of the AOL Time Warner Foundation, is how the nonprofit world can move online giving from crisis giving to more normal day-to-day giving.

For charities involved in the relief effort, strong internal communication and alliances with high-technology companies were crucial to their online success, officials from the American Red Cross and the September 11th Fund told conference participants.

“When 9/11 hit, our servers were failing,” said Martha Jones, a marketing executive at the American Red Cross. As a result, she said, on September 11 and 12 the charity probably received only four of every 10 gifts that visitors to its Web site attempted to make.

Technology companies that had worked with the Red Cross in the past were able to relieve some of the pressure on the organization’s Web site. Yahoo built an online-donation system on its own site, to which the Red Cross was able to point donors. Other companies, such as Amazon.com and AOL Time Warner, collected money at their sites on the charity’s behalf.

Just as important, according to Ms. Jones, was the effort the Red Cross had put into bolstering relationships between its technology staff and the other parts of the organization in the months before the attacks.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret at the Red Cross,” Ms. Jones told the audience. “Sometimes we didn’t talk to each other. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”

But, she said, by putting those lines of communication in place, the organization was able to take better advantage of the Internet in its response to the disaster. In the end, more than $65-million of the $933-million the Red Cross has raised for relief efforts came in online.

The assistance of high-technology companies was also important to the September 11th Fund, which saw roughly one-third of the $456-million it raised come in online.

The United Way of New York City, which along with the New York Community Trust created the September 11th Fund, receives only a handful of online donations each week, said Bertina Ceccarelli, senior vice president for marketing and communications for the United Way of New York City. It was able, though, to handle the flood of online gifts that poured in to the September 11th Fund because IBM offered to host the fund’s site on the server it uses for the Web site of the U.S. Open tennis championship.

More than one million donors made an online contribution to the September 11th Fund. The average size of those gifts was $103, compared with $93 for gifts made through the mail and over the telephone. Internet gifts made during a network telethon called “America: A Tribute to Heroes” on September 21 averaged $150, while the average donation recorded at the telethon call center was $100. Eighty-five percent of online donors chose to receive e-mail updates about the September 11th Fund.

The United Way of New York City decided early that the e-mail addresses of those donors would not be used for United Way solicitations. “We will just form a relationship by telling them what we do and how their dollars have made a difference,” said Ms. Ceccarelli. “If down the road they get a solicitation in the workplace and have a better idea of how we work, all the better.”

The purpose of the conference, “The Power of the Internet to Expand Giving, Volunteering, and Community Building,” was to discuss how the nonprofit world is using information technology in its fund raising and programs. A group of foundations, charities, and companies — including the AOL Time Warner and Verizon Foundations, Independent Sector, and United Way of America — sponsored the meeting.

Conference organizers put together a report, called “A Snapshot of Internet Innovation,” that profiles how 27 nonprofit organizations and foundations use e-mail and the Internet in their work. Each profile includes a contact person, as well as the organization’s address and telephone and fax numbers.

For example, the National Council on Aging, in Washington, runs a Web site called BenefitsCheckUp that allows older people to identify the state and federal benefits for which they qualify and then find out how to apply for them. Before BenefitsCheckUp, the council used a version of the service that was on computer disk; in 10 years the disk helped 200,000 people. In contrast, more than 500,000 people used the Web site in the first six months it was online.

The Baltimore Giving Project, sponsored by the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers, has developed an online tool, The Art of Charitable Planning, that financial advisers can use to help their clients explore giving options. The organization also uses its Web site to distribute its African American Giving Tool Kit and Giving Circle Starter Kit.

A survey of 733 people who had made an online contribution to a large international advocacy organization found that 80 percent of those donors go online every day, 56 percent do their banking or pay bills online, and 36 percent have high-speed broadband access at home.

“What you see is a picture of Internet superadopters, not early adopters,” said Mark Rovner, senior vice president at Craver, Mathews, Smith & Company, a fund-raising consulting company in Arlington, Va., that conducted the survey. He said the findings were in line with the results of other studies his company has done.

The survey also found that a little more than one-fourth of the respondents said that they would have considered making a monthly pledge if that option had been available, and 70 percent reported that they had taken advocacy action online.

More than 40 percent made their donations on their first visit to the organization’s Web site, and another 39 percent made their gifts within their first five visits.

Forty-four percent of the respondents said that they used a search engine to find the organization’s Web site. Twenty percent said they guessed the charity’s Internet address — “not beginner behavior,” Mr. Rovner said, while 12 percent saw a link to the site on another Web site and followed it.

“These are not people who were wandering onto a Web site and saying, ‘Gee, what a great organization. I’m going to give them money,’” said Mr. Rovner. He added, “These people are hunters, not browsers.”

Many of the speakers’ presentations, as well as the report on Internet innovations, are online at http://www.independentsector.org.