Public response to DEC appeal reaches £30 million

Howard Lake | 31 December 2004 | News

By late night on 30 December, The Guardian reports that the UK public had donated £30 million by phone and Internet to the DEC’s Tsunami/Earthquake appeal, the most rapid response to any UK charity appeal to date.

The amount donated will exceed even that figure, since many people will have given by post, or via the post office or banks and building societies. Indeed, the public have already donated considerable sums to individual charities involved in the relief effort: Oxfam and the British Red Cross have received £2.7 million and £3 million respectively in the first two and a half days of their appeals.

Steven Morris at SocietyGuardian lists just some of the remarkable donations that have been made, and the attempts by some of the charities to handle the rush of donations being offered. “Oxfam’s call centre was so busy,” he writes, “that staff brought in relatives who were given 15 minutes’ training before beginning to answer calls, which were coming in at more than 400 every hour.”

Save the Children has been handling over 2,000 calls a day from donors, and Muslim Aid told The Guardian that its phones and Web site had been busy all day yesterday handling donations.

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.