DEC Tsunami Earthquake appeal reaches £100 million
Howard Lake | 7 January 2005 | News
Yesterday afternoon the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Tsunami Earthquake appeal reached £100 million in public donations, £37 million of which has been donated online.
As of 6 January 2005 there have been 600,000 online donations raising £37 million. There have been 1.6 million phone calls to the donation hotline and an estimated 400,000 postal donations have been received.
These figures yield an average online donation of £61.67, and a combined average donation for telephone and postal donations of £31.50. We still await more details so that we can provide a breakdown between telephone and postal donations.
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This DEC appeal therefore becomes easily the most rapid and successful online fundraising appeal to date in the UK. It easily surpasses the achievements of Comic Relief which, until today, has been the most successful of the online fundraising charities in the UK. The DEC’s last emergency appeal for the Darfur region of Sudan raised £2 million online.
The DEC report the following regional breakdown of donations, according to projected estimates based on TV regions:
Anglia: £7.0m
Borders: £1.3m
Carlton: £21.0m
Central: £13.0m
Granada: £8.7m
HTV £7.6m
Meridian: £10.5m
Tyne Tees: £4.0m
Ulster: £1.2m
West Country: £3.2m
Yorkshire: £5.6m
Independent website traffic analysts Hitwise UK reported a 500% increase in traffic to charity websites in the seven days after the tsunami and earthquake disasters. The DEC’s website accounted for 48% of total charity site traffic.
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.