Jacob Colie:
Mercy Corps Aids Tsunami Relief
When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, the Oregon-based Mercy Corps was uniquely poised to help. Not only did the relief organization already have field offices in some of the hardest-hit regions of Indonesia, enabling it to be among the first on the ground with aid supplies, but the nonprofit had a sophisticated and dynamic website in place to handle the donations that began pouring in just hours after the disaster.
In the early hours of December 26, a staff member posted the devastating news — and the response was immediate. “Fortunately, we had just upgraded our server,” says director of internet marketing Jacob Colie. “Other non-profit sites crashed, but ours kept standing.”
“It’s very difficult to give people an exact picture of the complicated relief and development work we do. So the website is our front door. It’s the most important tool we have and the way we communicate with the most people.”
The server upgrade was just one of several fortunate coincidences that positioned Mercy Corps to speed aid to tsunami victims.
“Because it was year-end, many people were already visiting our site thinking about their tax-deductible donations,” relates Colie. And overall charitable giving via the web has grown dramatically as users have become more comfortable making financial transactions online.
Also, the agency had long-established programs on the ground in Indonesia. “We were among the first ones there and we were able to very quickly mount a program response to some of the most remote provinces in the region,” says Colie.
The Front Door
The website — entirely designed, built and maintained on Macs by a bare-bones team of four (in addition to Colie, the team includes Tanya Zumach, Roger Burks and Stuart Gatson) — was stress-tested that day as never before. “Traffic and donations are at the highest levels we’ve ever seen,” Colie declares. Behind him, scrawled figures on a white board attest to the recent outpouring of assistance to suffering people half a globe away.
To look around the web team’s office, you’d never guess how well their efforts pay off. Aside from a few maps stuck on the walls, the liveliest spot of decor is Url, a robust-looking Betafish that circles the glass bowl of an abandoned coffeepot. But perched on standard-issue desks are a Power Mac G5, Power Mac G4 and two PowerBook G4s that deliver all the horsepower Colie’s team needs to invite the world to help Mercy Corps help others.
The website is vital to the organization’s mission and success. “It’s very difficult to give people an exact picture of the complicated relief and development work we do,” explains Colie. “So the website is our front door. It’s the most important tool we have and the way we communicate with the most people.”
Since 1999, when Colie first began working on the site (having joined Mercy Corps as a data entry clerk the year before), it has changed radically. “The Mac has been the tool that drives the development of the site,” says Colie. He first built it on a PC as “a very basic, static site,” but soon set his sights much higher. “We wanted to make it dynamic and database-driven so we could interact with our users more. Someone recommended that I look into Mac OS X as a development platform, and I made the decision to switch in 2001. As I’ve learned more about the Mac, the site has become more advanced. Today it is a very mature website.
