[Air-l] Re: Internet as a tool for charity

[Kirsten A. Foot]

Chris Helland wrote:

>Is anyone aware of any research done and published on the use of the Internet >for charity and relief efforts?

Chris, in a study of 247 Web sites related to the airliner attacks on 9/11/01, Steve Schneider and I found that 36% enabled site visitors to provide some type of assistance to survivors. (See Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider, 'Online Structures for Citizen Engagement in the September 11th Web Sphere', Electronic Journal of Communication, Vol. 14, N. 3 & 4, 2004, http://www.cios.org/www/ejc/v143toc.htm.  A pre-pub version is available at http://faculty.washington.edu/kfoot/Publications/040228.Post911-EJOC-final.pdf)

Although we did not differentiate between financial donations and other types of assistance (e.g. blood donations, supplies), my recollection is that many of these sites enabled financial donations.

Two Web archives that might be useful to you are:
September 11 Web Archive http://september11.archive.org
Asian Tsunami Web Archive http://tsunami.archive.org

Here is one example from the September 11 Web Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011001004055/helping.org/(again, this loads slowly because it is an archival page)

here is another:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011101003716/www.americandisaster.com/ (again, this loads slowly because it is an archival page) Note the advertisement at the top of the page to "Help support the Red Cross through the purchase of Lady Liberty t-shirts", and the section near the bottom of the page "Here is what you have donated so far".

Other examples of assistance provision can be found by starting here:
http://september11.archive.org
then clicking "What could people do"
then clicking Provide>assistance
then clicking the archival impression date after any of the sites listed in the index for that action

-Kirsten

***************************************
Kirsten Foot, PhD
Assistant Professor, Communication
University of Washington
Box 353740
Seattle, WA 98195-3740
kfoot at u.washington.edu
http://webarchivist.org