[David Strom's Web Informant] 18 January 2010: Aiding Haiti

[David Strom]

Web Informant 18 January 2010: Aiding Haiti

We all know by now about the horrific Haiti quake and how it has
decimated that already impoverished country's infrastructure last
week. I have been spending time looking into how our own charitable
infrastructure is holding up in getting funds and manpower to the
relief effort. So far, the efforts have been mixed, to say the least,
although not lacking in the best of intentions.

Various relief agencies, including the Red Cross, Salvation Army,
Doctors Without Borders, and others have collected millions of dollars
seemingly overnight. Many of these groups are using the tech services
of either mGive.com or the Mobile Giving Foundation. I have seen
numbers for the total collected with these providers at more than $20
million. Considering that most of these donations have been $10 ones
that were charged to individual's cell phone bills, it is an
impressive donations velocity. Both vendors make  systems that allow
people to text one of a series of messages for supporting these
organizations.  Here is probably the most comprehensive list of
Haitian-related charities:
http://www.mobilegiving.org/?page_id=364

The Mobile Giving and mGive donations are what is called unrestricted
donations, meaning you’re your funds aren't going directly for Haitian
relief, but for the organizations to do what they wish with the money.
Having volunteered several times at the Red Cross, I can also tell you
that donors that direct their donations for a particular event there
are really paying it forward – just like I wrote about Kiva.org's
efforts, when you call the Red Cross and say you want to support the
Haiti relief efforts, in reality you are giving money to their
"International Relief Fund" which has already sent money collected
from prior efforts to help Haitians today. Think of this as more of a
revolving fund, with the hope that monies coming in can balance the
outflows, or do even better to help less publicized causes.

But there is a problem with donating through text messages. The
carriers normally place a 60 to 90 day hold on disbursing all the
funds collected. This is to cover their float for  those people that
have a change of heart when they get their monthly cell bills, or just
don't pay them promptly, or other reasons. Some of the carriers have
decided to go ahead and distribute the donations without waiting,
which is admirable.

Mobile Giving and mGive aren't the only games in town, and others have
taken up the cause by organizing Facebook groups and fan pages to
attract donors. Sadly, some of these are fakes, as this story from
MSNBC points out:
http://bit.ly/8HkM4S

Many stories have focused on how cell phone service is for the most
part operating in Haiti, unlike the landlines, which for the most part
aren't. Why is this the case? Mainly because the cell towers have been
constructed with the poor electric grid from day one. Each cell tower
has a diesel backup generator – which is common practice in many
developing countries – but the difference is that they were built to
store several days' worth of fuel to provide running backup power.
While that means that the cell companies have to get fuel to their
towers, right now this is one of the reasons why they can still make
connections. Similarly the broadband wireless data services like those
supporting Blackberries seem to be working too.

What about getting food and water and medical supplies – and aid
workers -- airlifted to Haiti? This is a big problem currently, as
many of the news outlets have reported: the tiny airport is
overwhelmed with flights, and a few have had to be turned back because
they couldn't get a landing slot. The air traffic tower was damaged,
and imagine trying to run a busy airport like LaGuardia or O'Hare by
having the controllers sit quite literally on the field – even with a
single runway, it is a challenge. The US is running operations there
at the airport, by the way. The nearest international airport is a
six-hour drive away in the Dominican Republic, and that has been the
path that some flights have had to take if they couldn't land in
Port-au-Prince.

That is how the International Rescue Committee is getting its own aid
workers there. I spoke to David Goodman, a good friend of mine who is
the organization's CTO. The IRC has emergency staff on the ground and
more are arriving throughout the week. They have been using a Mobile
Giving cellphone donation system, "and fortunately we started our
Mobile Giving campaign during the holiday season in NYC taxi cabs and
so we had that infrastructure in place prior to the Haiti quake." The
IRC is part of a consortium of 28 organizations called NetHope
(www.nethope.org) that provides common IT services for relief efforts,
and as you imagine there have already been conference calls to pool
efforts to obtain connectivity in Haiti that can be shared. Goodman
himself has been to Africa several times to set up C-band satellite
links for their offices and tells me that, like Africa, Haitian
Internet access is still pretty spotty, although the situation is
changing minute by minute as more resources get established on the
ground.

In my call with Goodman, we talked about the issue of having a low
overhead organization and being held to that metric by charitable
givers. "We spend 90% of donations on our programs and the low
overhead is attractive to lots of donors. If I could spend more money
to give our aid workers better communications tools I would.  It would
help increase their productivity even more." It made me stop and think
about my own criteria for donations.

I ended up giving money to Partners in Health (pih.org), a group that
has medical teams already in Haiti. I wanted to see an immediate
benefit of my donation and thought they would be in the best position
to help.

Those of you on this email list that would like to share your
thoughts, please use my Strominator.com blog to post your comments for
all to see.