Preceding my return yesterday, which was glamorously announced by Alison, I was touring the USA with my parents for a couple of weeks and thus not reading any news, so today I browsed the New York Times and came across this article by Suzanne Vega where she the describes her experience with the “two-hit-wonder” label she got despite the fact that she is a very active, successful and excellent writer/singer besides those two hits.
At GlobalGiving we are in a similar spot. With the recent disasters in Myanmar and China and the following media coverage the donations on our site have spiked. But what is not so obvious is the fact that it takes a lot of continuous effort by a whole team here at GlobalGiving to make it possible that in these disaster situations the donors can be quickly connected with people and projects that need support. What goes often unnoticed is the fact that we are open 24/7, 365 days a year and the projects on our site need support throughout the year not just when disaster strikes.
The challenge we face is to bridge the gap between the awareness in disaster situations and the generally low awareness when no disaster strikes. And just as with Suzanne Vega we do this by continuos daily efforts to build and expand a platform for projects to get exposure and on the other hand we try to increase the awareness both for the need that these projects have as well as the opportunity people have to support them through GlobalGiving.
