Britons raise £20 million for Asian tsunami floods appeal
Howard Lake | 30 December 2004 | News
The BBC reports this morning that the emergency appeal for victims of Boxing Day’s floods disaster around the Indian Ocean has raised over £20 million already.
This early total makes it one of the most successful emergency appeals to date. The figure was boosted considerably following yesterday evening’s TV and radio appeals. “Hundreds of thousands of telephone pledges” were received as a result on the 3,000 telephone lines that the DEC has set up for their donation hotline. Even before the appeals though £5 million had been donated by phone and online.
A further £5 million was donated overnight: DEC’s Chief Executive Brendan Gormley told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning that, by the time he left the office at midnight last night, 400,000 telephone calls had been received and £15 million had been donated by phone and the Web.
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At midday today the DEC’s Web site was continuing to struggle under the enormous surge of traffic it is receiving, so the number of online donations is almost certainly fewer than it could have been. It is to be hoped that an Internet firm will step in and help the agency handle the massive attempt to donate by using more advanced server load balancing and other technology expertise.
By this afternoon the DEC reported that it had received more than 524,000 phone calls.
The total of public donations already exceeds the initial amount of £15 million in aid promised by the UK government.
The figure of £20 million does not include donations to other UK aid agencies, nor corporate donations of equipment or expertise such as the US$1 million (about £522,000) worth of equipment donated by digger firm JCB and the £1 million donated by communications company Vodafone.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.