I need advice and guidance on organizing fundraising for relief efforts in the Philippines following Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan. A graduate school friend originally from the Philippines has asked me to help organize fundraising, but I've never tackled this sort of thing before. I'm turning to the dkos community for some help to get me moving. There have got to be hundreds of people active here who have experience doing this sort of work, and, boy, could I use your help!
I will be reaching out to a network of fellow Columbia University sustainability management, sustainable development, and international affairs students and alumni. We will probably do a series of fundraising events near campus over the next few weeks, but we need to get some basic things figured out.
The three immediate areas I need help with are online fundraising platforms, identifying groups active in relief who would be good candidates for donations, and basic set up for this sort of fundraising.
Platforms: Can anyone suggest a good, easy to use platform for our fundraising? What have you worked with before that gave you good results? Have you used CrowdRise, Qgiv, or Razoo, and, if so, what did you think of them?
Organizations: I have the list from Huffington Post of the obvious organizations doing relief now: World Food Programme, International Red Cross, Philippine Red Cross, AmeriCares, World Vision, and Salvation Army. Do you know of other groups who are active, effective, reputable and in need of support?
Fundraising setup: How do I begin putting this together? If I do the online platform I think donations can be sent directly to groups, but if I do any events how do I handle the money collected? Do I need to set up a bank account to hold the money? Do I need some sort of documentation that this is a legitimate effort in order to do that or to arrange for events at local businesses?
I will be following comments for a couple hours this evening and tomorrow, so if you have any guidance please offer it below. Thanks!