A hurricane, an earthquake, a flood. Within hours there are images, a text-to-donate number and a strong urge to do something. This guide is about making that urge count.
Give money, not things
Every disaster relief coordinator says the same thing and the public does the same thing anyway: ships clothes, canned food, bottled water. Donated goods have to be sorted, stored, transported and often thrown away; relief workers call the pile the “second disaster.” Cash lets responders buy exactly what is needed, locally, which also puts money into the affected economy instead of shipping it in.
If the affected area has functioning markets, and most do within days, the best form of cash is cash to the affected people themselves. Humanitarian agencies have shifted heavily toward direct cash assistance over the past decade because recipients spend it on what they most need and it costs less to deliver than goods.
Give to organizations already there
The groups that do the most in the first week are the ones with staff, warehouses and relationships in place before it happened: national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, local NGOs, community foundations, faith networks. International agencies that fly in are essential for very large disasters and much less so for medium ones, where they can crowd out local capacity.
A practical filter: does the organization name the specific place and describe what it was doing there before the disaster? If the appeal could be pasted onto any disaster, keep looking.
Consider waiting a week
Disaster giving is front-loaded. The Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s annual analysis finds most funding arrives in the first weeks and goes to immediate relief. Recovery, rebuilding homes, restoring livelihoods and water systems, mental health support, runs for years and is chronically underfunded because the cameras have left.
Waiting also lets you see which organizations are actually delivering. In the first 48 hours nobody can tell you that. In the second week, local reporting can.
Beware the appeals that are not about this disaster
Large national charities sometimes raise money on a disaster’s name and spend it on general operations, which may be legal and even sensible but is not what donors thought they were buying. Look for a statement that funds raised for the disaster are restricted to it, or give to a fund set up specifically for it (community foundations in the affected area usually have one).
The uncomfortable comparison
Measured strictly by lives saved per dollar, disaster relief in a middle-income country rarely competes with routine child-health programs in a low-income one. A dollar to a well-covered earthquake response is a dollar many others are also sending; a dollar to seasonal malaria medicine is not. GiveWell’s top charities are estimated at $3,500 to $5,500 per life saved, a bar that famous disaster appeals almost never publish, let alone meet.
That does not make disaster giving wrong. People give to disasters because a specific place and specific people are suffering in front of them, and that is a legitimate reason. It does mean that if your goal is the most good per dollar, disaster appeals are usually not where the marginal dollar is scarce, and if you give to them anyway, the guidance above at least gets your dollar to the affected people rather than to a warehouse.
Checklist
- Cash, never goods.
- An organization with a pre-existing presence in the specific place.
- Restricted to this disaster, or a local fund.
- Consider giving in week two, and consider giving to recovery in year one.
- Keep your routine impact giving where the evidence is.
Method notes
The “second disaster” phrase and the preference for cash over goods are the consensus of coordinating bodies such as NVOAD and the UN cluster system. Timing patterns are from CDP’s annual reports; we have not cited a specific year’s percentage because the pattern, not the figure, is the point.
Sources
Figures come from the cited sources as of the dates shown. Cost-effectiveness estimates change as programs and evidence change; check the source before giving. We are not financial advisers and receive nothing from any charity named here.