You’re deluged every day by chain emails promising good fortune if you forward a message to 20 friends. And the stream of Monica Lewinsky jokes seems endless. So, you might miss one urging you to open your wallet and help the American Red Cross campaign for disaster relief from Hurricane Mitch.
“We all love the Internet. Now let’s show its true power by creating the largest network of giving in history,” the email proposes. The message asks the receiver to send a US$5 donation to the Red Cross and forward the mail to five other people. Says American Red Cross spokeswoman Ann Andrews, “It’s great, but we didn’t send it out.”
“The devastation of Hurricane Mitch floored me,” says Erik Hannah, a 28-year-old advertising executive in New York. “I spent a great deal of time in Central America and Mexico. Towns which I slept in had been washed away overnight. Friends were missing.”
Hannah started a food and clothing drive at the office but decided he had to do more. He hit upon the idea of an email plea.
Posted to various newsgroups, the message encourages donations and asks recipients to forward the email to friends hoping to create, in Hannah’s words, “an instant worldwide relief campaign.”
Donations to the Red Cross in the last week, from online and traditional channels, “have been unprecedented,” says Andrews. “The response has even surpassed that of Oklahoma City.” It’s not clear how Hannah’s email has bolstered those contributions.
Still, Hannah says, within 48 hours of posting the message, he received replies from as far away as Russia.
“Most told how they had made a generous donation to their local Red Cross office,” he says. “It proved to me the good which can result when the power of the people meets the power of the Internet.”
