The Internet is being used increasingly for making donations to charity organisations.
- But people seem to forget that a web service has to be on-line in order for money to come in, says Bodelius at SiteScanner.
In the wake of the tsunami disaster the Internet has become increasingly used as a medium for donating money to charity. According to UNICEF around 16 million of its donations are made via the website. But SiteScanner's survey shows that web availability is not a priority concern everywhere.
In the last week alone Save the Children Sweden's website was down a total of three days. The website had similar problems at the beginning of May, when it was off-line for a three-day period. Save the Children's web availability was as low as 87 percent, which is far short of an acceptable level.
Whenever the website is off-line the organisation loses donations. But that's not all: charity websites also inform the public about the organisation and about different ways in which people can get involved. When the website is down visitors are deprived of this information, which in some cases may lead to loss of interest.
- Too much downtime for a website can damage the brand name. For e-businesses this means the customer simply goes elsewhere. This is presumably the same kind of loss that affects charity organisations, says Olle Bodelius, CEO of SiteScanner.