Haiti

Among the U.S. Haitian community, time has not lessened the impact of the quake that struck on Jan. 12, 2010, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and more than a million still homeless. Ever since, it seems even the most ordinary Haitian-Americans have transformed into mom-and-pop philanthropists. There is hardly a person of Haitian descent who hasn't felt the need to help out — even in the smallest of ways. It's a kind of micro-aid that is tiny in scale but largely consistent.

Kids Can Press will donate 50 percent of its profits from the sales of "This Child, Every Child: A Book About the World's Children in North America" to ONEXONE, a nonprofit foundation committed to improving the lives of children. The donation will be used to deliver books to children in Haiti and will be distributed in a variety of ways, including donations to libraries at two new schools: L'cole Nouvelle Zoranje and L'cole Nouvelle Royal Caribbean.

Nearly 60 percent of people who donated to charities involved in the Haiti relief-and-recovery effort said they were either very confident or somewhat confident that their donations were well spent, according to a survey released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the destructive earthquake.

Only 17 percent of the nearly 2,000 donors studied were not at all confident in how the charities spent money raised to support the relief efforts, said Charity Navigator, a watchdog group in Glen Rock, N.J.

In the year after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, Americans gave more than $1.4-billion to aid survivors and help the impoverished country rebuild, according to a Chronicle survey of 60 major relief organizations. Roughly 38 percent of that sum has been spent to provide recovery and rebuilding aid.

The outpouring, while generous, fell short of the $1.6-billion Americans contributed in the year after the South Asian tsunamis and the staggering $3.3-billion they donated in the 12 months following Hurricane Katrina.

The outpouring of charitable giving in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti reinforced the fact that people who give for emergency relief differ from everyday donors, a new study says.

Thirty-eight percent of Americans gave to help Haiti, including 52 percent of donors who regularly give to nonprofits, says the Heart of the Donor: Insights into Donor Motivation and Behavior for the 21st Century.

When the Haiti earthquake hit back in January, the outcry and response were swift and plentiful. In this new era of the iPhone and other mobile devices, the biggest buzz in the fundraising sector was generated from the mobile-giving explosion following the disaster. But the biggest takeaway for fundraisers — all of them, not just disaster-relief organizations — is that donors have certain, higher expectations these days, and your organization must meet them.

More Blogs