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

Then, on the morning of Aug. 26, “There was this thing in the Gulf,” recounts Laurie Conkerton, vice president for development for ANI. That “thing in the Gulf” turned out to be Hurricane Katrina, one of the costliest and most deadly hurricanes in the history of the United States, which devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast.