How Haiti Changed Fundraising

“We now recognize that we’ll be in this business for a while. We created a general disaster-relief fund. We aren’t a disaster-relief organization, per se, but our members expected us to respond, so we did,” Whitehead said.

Catholic Relief Services
As a traditional disaster-relief organization, CRS was experienced and ready to respond to the Haiti earthquake. It also got a bit lucky. When news broke of the quake, the staff was having a meeting. In that meeting, there just so happened to be the West African correspondent, who speaks French. "So within 10 minutes of the news breaking, he was able to talk to our regional correspondent and immediately work to take action," Melia said.