On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast near Buras, Louisiana, bringing floods that devastated New Orleans. More than 1,833 people in the region died.
Nearly 228,000 homes and apartments in New Orleans were flooded, including 39% of all owner-occupied units and 56% of all rental units. Approximately 204,700 housing units in Louisiana were either destroyed or sustained major damage.
In the wake of the hurricane, the Red Cross announced that as many as 450,000 people would need housing. FEMA would later estimate that Katrina displaced as many as one million people. Unfortunately, neither FEMA nor the Red Cross was equipped to support the temporary housing needs this catastrophe caused.
Our Response: KatrinaHousing.org
To address this massive housing shortage, my good friend Joel Otterstrom built, within 48 hours, KatrinaHousing.org, which had a searchable online database where people could offer temporary housing for Hurricane Katrina survivors.
Unknowingly, Joel had developed the first of its kind house-sharing platform, a model that Airbnb wouldn’t create and popularize for another three years.
After Joel built Katrina Housing, he contacted me and asked if I would “get the word out” about the website. By accepting his invitation, I would end up doing much more than marketing Katrina Housing.
Here are some additional roles I took on:
- The company’s spokesperson
- Managing volunteer efforts
- Running the in-house call center
- Working as a volunteer
- Overseeing partner relationships
Eventually, I would take over as Executive Director and run the operations until we merged Katrina Housing with another emergency housing organization.
Turning Digital Efforts Into Emergency Relief
When I started the marketing efforts for Katrina Housing, we had no budget. Another teammate, Eran Greenburg, and I wrote several news releases and worked with volunteers to do extensive outreach across the web, seeking forums and blogs that discussed relief efforts for hurricane survivors. We enlisted several dozen of these platforms to post our news releases to bring awareness to our website.
In the early days of the disaster, I worked with other emergency housing efforts to centralize and consolidate all the web efforts to help the hurricane survivors. We launched a blog (which was fairly innovative in 2005) to keep the community we created informed of our efforts.
To overcome our budget deficit, I set up Katrina Housing as an official 501(c)(3), making it possible to accept donations.
I established close partnerships with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Salvation Army, Ancestry.com, Verio, and Zion’s Bank and enlisted their help in supporting our website and a toll-free helpline.
Most Katrina survivors who needed housing didn’t have Internet access. So, I worked with my friend Joel and used his company’s toll-free number. With his number, we established a call center with our partners to help people use Katrina Housing.
To handle the surge of popularity we were receiving at the height of our efforts, I managed 10+ volunteers who handled the call overflow that the other call centers couldn’t take or during off hours.
I designed a simple one-page flyer featuring our toll-free number and had hundreds of them printed in Houston. We had a Texan volunteer who worked with his local church to distribute the flyers to everyone possible at the Louisiana Superdome.
The Powerful Impacts of Digital Emergency Relief
In our first two weeks, Katrina Housing had placed almost 5,000 families and individuals in temporary homes. In the end, we placed over 100,000 people and generated 186,118 listings that people could use to help them overcome their dire situation.
My early guerrilla marketing efforts led to interviews with national networks such as NBC News, Fox News, CBS, and The New York Times. These interviews broadcast our website and toll-free number, making it possible to reach millions of people who could provide temporary housing.
Our blog became the centralized platform for the digital relief efforts that were happening with the Katrina and Rita hurricanes (Rita hit Louisiana & Texas not even a month later). We consistently published dozens of weekly blog updates on emergency efforts and provided a much-needed channel of communication for digital volunteers and on-the-ground emergency workers.
By creating a legal non-profit, I was able to collect over $250,000 in donations to help us further support the relief efforts. Our 501(c)(3) status enabled us to establish key corporate partnerships that allowed us to use their infrastructure free of charge to handle the heavy volume of traffic to our website and helpline number.
Our nonprofit status was also key in becoming a premier partner with the Department of Homeland Security and the Salvation Army. This partnership allowed us to show our toll-free number on the JumboTron in the Louisiana Superdome. FEMA even publicly singled out KatrinaHousing.org and the emergency efforts we were doing.
The Media’s Response
Here are a few news articles showing how Katrina Housing significantly helped with the hurricane relief effort:
- NBC News: How to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina
- NBC News: Katrina evacuees redefine ‘full house’
- Salt Lake Tribune: Web links people, homes
- WHIR News: Web Host Verio Adds to Hurricane Relief
- MarketingSherpa: Guerrilla Marketing to Aid Katrina Victims
- The Daily Universe: Centers connect refugees
- Meridian Magazine: Katrinahousing.org – Three LDS Programmers Team Up to Help
- The Baltimore Sun: Aiding victims of storm has proved a tough task
- Hartford Courant: Keeping Relief Flowing South
Disasters reveal more than destruction. They reveal the strength of communities, the generosity of strangers, and the power of innovation under pressure. KatrinaHousing.org showed that some of the most effective solutions don’t always come from large institutions. Sometimes they begin with a few determined people who simply decide to help.