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

Lessons learned
Conkerton stresses the need for organizations and departments within organizations to have a disaster plan and to review it on an ongoing basis, as it’s easy to overlook even the most basic things.

“It seems so obvious, but electronic versions of every document that you would need to produce a grant request need to be at the top of a fundraiser’s evacuation list,” she says. “It’s the kind of thing you don’t think of because when you’re in your office, you always have easy access to that information. When you don’t have it, you miss it.”