LONDON (AlertNet) - At the height of the wave of post-tsunami donations, computer servers for an umbrella group of top British charities were pulling in donations of more than a million pounds an hour.

"The immediacy of online giving is what attracts the public - they see something in the media, go online and donate and it makes them feel like they've done something to help there and then," said Will Slater, a British Red Cross press officer drafted in to help the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC).

The DEC is an agreement between the top British humanitarian relief charities to work closely with one another and the media to streamline fundraising efforts during extreme crises. And for the Asian tsunami it has worked like never before.

Blanket media coverage during the Christmas news lull helped the appeal pull in more than half a million online donations totalling more than £30m ($56m) - dwarfing last year's Darfur appeal which generated just £2m ($3.8m) from the web.

Statistics from online consultancy Hitwise show that traffic to charity websites rose five-fold during the first few days after the tsunami, and the DEC website accounted for an astonishing 48 percent of total charity site traffic.

British NGO Christian Aid, one of the most creative charities when it comes to using the web, raised more than £700,000 ($1.3m) online in the nine days following the tsunami -- nearly four times as much as it took in credit card donations over the phone -- but it did so by keeping things very simple.

THE POWER OF THE WEB

"A lot of Christian Aid supporters donated spontaneously. They already know us and our online donation page, so we concentrated on providing news and updates from staff and partners in the affected areas, which is what people want," said online PR officer Kati Dshedshorov.

It could be argued that the sheer scale of the emergency and the media coverage were bound to increase online donations.

But while the tsunami has set online donation records that are not likely to be beaten for a while, there are signs that major charities and other interested groups are beginning to understand how to exploit the power of the web as a key fundraising channel.

The DEC, for example, includes in its rapid response team two agencies -- Tango Zebra and Joshua Interactive -- whose brief is to design and place banner advertisements on popular consumer sites in a bid to increase awareness of the appeal.

AOL UK is one of the sites featuring a DEC banner.

In the U.S., parcel delivery service UPS provides a drop-off service for users sending items transacted over online auction site eBay -- auctiondrop.com -- which since the tsunami has taken unwanted consumer electronics goods and donated the net auction proceeds to CARE's relief fund.

Charities are also attracted by the economics of e-fundraising: they are finding it's faster and cheaper than conventional fundraising.

THE DARKER SIDE

"What makes online giving really valuable is that we get the money straight away and we don't have to spend time transcribing phone calls or opening envelopes," said DEC's Will Slater.

However, as with anything concerning the web, there is a darker side.

Hoaxers are posing as tsunami victims on the internet in a bid to divert funds flowing to relief victims, according to security experts.

They warn it is only a question of time before we see spoof versions of well-known charity websites.

British charity Action Against Hunger UK said it was the subject of a hoax e-mail requesting contributions to Action Against Hunger Netherlands -- a non-existent branch.

It's a back-handed compliment, but you know when you've arrived when the scam artists start mimicking your methods.

A version of this article was first published in Guardian Unlimited on January 7, 2005

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