Yahoo.com raises $876,850 online for American Red Cross appeal
Howard Lake | 31 December 2004 | News
Yahoo.com has begun handling online donations to the American Red Cross and is already nearing its first $1 million.
By 14.00 today, 9,385 donations totalling $876,850 had been made online. The average value of gifts therefore is an impressively high $93.43.
The Yahoo! page presents visitors with a range of different buttons featuring different donation amounts. Donors can choose to give $10, $25, $50, $100, $250, $500, $1,000, $2,500, or $5,000. Those wishing to make gifts of different amounts are encouraged to telephone the American Red Cross and make a donation directly.
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The choice of $5,000 as the maximum option seems odd as it is a comparatively low figure, given the reports of many people’s generosity to various of the current emergency appeals. Average online gifts are also almost always higher than average offline gifts. It will be interesting to see if a higher maximum is added to this page.
The donation facility is being promoted on the front page of Yahoo.com together with links to the Web sites of UNICEF, AmeriCares, Oxfam America, and Network for Good. The promotion appears in a very prominent position towards the top of the page, directly under the search box.
There is no similar promotion on the pages of Yahoo! UK & Ireland.
Yahoo says that “the American Red Cross pays nothing to Yahoo! for operating this Web site. One-hundred percent of your donation is collected by the American Red Cross.” It offered a similar online donation tool to the American Red Cross in the weeks following the terrorist attacks in the USA of 11 September 2001.
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.