The tragedy that is unfolding right before our eyes is so sad, it’s hard for me to even imagine how it all came to this. It seems that despite the fact that everyone knew a hurricane was going to hit, no one could predict how bad it was going to be.

I know a lot of people want to help, but I didn’t fully realize the compassion people had until today. My company provides online donation services for a couple non-profit relief organizations, and I got to see a small ‘behind-the-scenes’ glimpse of what’s going on. All I can say is that the amount of financial support that people are giving is absolutely phenomenal. I setup a hurricane relief donation form on Monday for one of our clients and created a small link to it from their homepage (since their web site design didn’t really have a good spot to place a big emergency ‘donate-now’ button). So this morning, I start up my web browser, login to their admin panel, and check up on the donation form to make sure it’s working properly. What I see completely blows my mind. I don’t think it’s my place to say exactly how much was collected, but I will say that the donation form has already collected 6 figures. Wow. In just 72 hours.

If you are thinking of helping out, the best thing you can do is to give a financial donation. Donating items like shoes, boots, water, or whatever only adds burden to the relief effort, since time and resources has to be taken to sort, clean, ship, and distribute the items. It’s much more efficient for a relief organization to use money to buy large quantities of items wholesale from local companies.

Here’s some organizations that are taking donations:

• Red Cross (mirrors: Amazon, Apple)
• Salvation Army
• Giving Works - run by eBay / PayPal
• Charity Navigator - help you sort through all the different relief orgs
• more organizations…

Here is a personal blog that’s being continuously updated with first hand accounts of everything we’ve been hearing on the news. Apparently, this guy is located in an office in downtown New Orleans managing some mission critical servers (running on generators). There is also a live webcam feed.