Relief at the Speed of Bits
As the death toll from the Haitian earthquake rolls upward and the aftershocks continue to rumble, I’m stunned at how fast people have been able to pull together to offer support for Haiti’s battered people. In just a few days—in some cases barely in a few hours—people and organizations have been able to pull together benefits designed to help charities already on the ground in Haiti and in desperate need of new funds to help pay for the costs of their rescue and relief efforts.
Pop Cap Games, for instance, ran a promotion last Saturday in which the proceeds for their sales went straight to Partners in Health. Under the banner Indie Relief, dozens of independent software developers for the iPhone and Mac gave their proceeds on January 20 to a double fistful of worth charities too. Wired Magazine‘s GeekDad folks just set up their own fundraising drive, featuring prizes from Gunnar Optiks and my pal John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame. The great people at DriveThruRPG coordinated a promotion with their publishers to bring you nearly $1,500 worth of roleplaying game PDFs for anyone making a $20 donation to Doctors Without Borders through their site.
The speed of the response is amazing. I’ve contributed to benefit books in the past. They work well for raising funds for charities going through a normal year, but they’re awful for helping out with emergencies. It just takes too long to get everything coordinated and moving.
I took part in a project to raise money for the victims of the 2004 tsunami. Unfortunately, by the time the people running it had gotten their act together, the emergency had long passed, and the project was scrapped. The Beyond the Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy book—which raised funds for the Red Cross to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina—came out in October, 2005, over a month after the hurricane hit, and that was a print-on-demand project tossed together at lightning speed. It made some money for the cause, but it could have made a lot more if it had been out right away.
With society so attuned to Internet speed these days, instant fund-raisers or projects are far more successful than those that appear run weeks, months, or years after the fact. It’s not just that we have a short attention span about such things. It’s that there’s often already a new emergency to worry about, one that eclipses thoughts about the past ones, at least for a while. Projects that reach the world now, when the spotlight is on them, are bound to do better than those that do not.
The lesson here is that the project doesn’t have to be thematically related to the disaster. You don’t need to come up with a whole anthology of new—or even recycled—material for a book, album, or whatever. You just have to be willing to pledge your profits for a period of time to go to the cause and then publicize it. You get the exposure, the charity gets the funds, and good-hearted people get to sample your wares for free. It’s a win all the way around.
