Emergency Appeal site relaunched

SOS Children announced today that it had relaunched and revamped its emergency relief website www.emergency-appeal.org .

"Although our Emergency Relief Programs are not our main focus" said Chief Executive Andrew Cates "And although our main feeling looking at every disaster is compassion about those suffering, looking back it is hard to avoid just a little pride about all that we have managed to achieve."

In general SOS Children is a long term charity (reflecting the long term needs of orphaned children) in stark contrast to charities which arrive at each disaster on the plane with the TV crews and pack up and leave as soon as the TV carmeras go. However this long term and child focus means we are often the first to start (we were the first in help with children in the Sri Lankan IDP camps last week), the first to take custody of children (since we are already licenced; for example after the earthquake in Kashmir we were made guardian of all unaccompanied children) and sometimes invited by governments to operate their emergency programs for children (as last month in Pakistan).

The relaunch in part reflects the enormous success of the internet in charity fundraising which has helped to drive down charity costs and helped better charities continue to grow rapidly at low cost during the credit crunch. The emergency relief website is being relaunched with details of just a few of the hundreds of successful programs included on it, but will have more material added over time. "We have more than a hundred pages just on our post Asian tsunami work still to put up" continued Cates, "And although it is not news anymore it seems a pity not to archive it somewhere where people can study it and understand all the things which need to be done after such a calamity".

The website has been relaunched on Plone, open source software which we are starting to use for all our websites. Previously the site was written directly in HTML and put up using a file transfer protocol but SOS Children decided that its use of volunteers to help with the website meant that a system which was easier to use was needed.