Shopping drops, but shoppers’ giving soars
Even though online shopping declined dramatically following the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., retail sites were the most powerful drivers of donors to the Red Cross and other charitable sites, says Compete Inc., which tracks web traffic. Links from eBay and Amazon sent more traffic to Red Cross than did links from CNN and the Washington Post during the week after the attack, Compete reports.
Sites such as those operated by Amazon, Home Depot, Sears, Kmart, Best Buy, eBags and others actively encouraged customers to donate to the Red Cross and other organizations by offering users a direct link to charitable organizations’ sites from their home pages. Early in the crisis, eBags collected donations on behalf of the Red Cross until the Red Cross’s site was able to handle traffic again.
By this morning, Amazon.com had collected $6.8 million from 173,000 donors. In addition Kmart’s BlueLight.com had contributed $230,000 from the proceeds of flag sales from the site. In the days immediately following the tragedy, Compete estimates that charitable donations to the Red Cross`s Disaster Relief Fund made through Amazon.com represented nearly 20% of the total dollars consumers spent on the Amazon site.
Compete also reports that page views of charity-related organizations, measured as a fraction of overall web traffic, increased over 2000% from Sept. 12-18 compared to August. Unique visitors to the Red Cross site increased from under 20,000 during the week prior to the attack to nearly 2.5 million during the week of the attack, an increase of 13,617%.
"The response of the American citizenry, both corporate and individual, to
this tragedy has been magnificent," said Derick Sutton, vice president,
Compete Advisory Service. "We hope this kind of analysis can help charitable organizations understand patterns of public response to assist them in using the Internet in an ongoing way for public outreach."
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