With many of its facilities in ruins, and its employees, customers, volunteers and donors scattered by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ Audubon Nature Institute turned to the Web to raise the money needed to get back to its mission.

By Abny Santicola

Initial components of the site were a request for donations, a letter from ANI CEO Ron Foreman, a press release about the animal relocation and a Web-based Gmail address to contact the organization. Until ANI’s mail server was up and running again in October, Conkerton says she was a regular at the public library in Seven Points, Texas, where every day she’d take over a computer station to check and respond to constituent e-mails. Some of the e-mails included pictures from people who had visited the aquarium days before the storm as a sort of tribute, others were from extended family members of employees who hadn’t been heard from since Katrina, and others offered things such as helicopters to airlift food to the animals.