NetAid Poverty Effort Gets Off to Slow Start

NetAid, the philanthropic organization launched with three international concerts last month by the high-tech industry and the United Nations as a joint response to world poverty, is facing a major reorganization in the wake of figures showing that public contributions have amounted to only $1 million and that visits to its Web site have been only a fraction of what was anticipated.

“There’s a need now for a substantial rethinking,” said Ken Kragen, producer of the 1985 fund-raising song “We Are the World” and one of NetAid’s founders. “My hope was to get considerably more response” to the international concert and appeal that kicked off the effort Oct. 9.

NetAid, which is sponsored by the U.N. Development Programme and Cisco Systems, a leading developer of networking technology, announced last week that it had so far raised $12 million in contributions. Of that total, however, $10 million came from Cisco, which regards the organization as an in-house cause. Another $1 million came from KPMG, a consulting firm that is a partner with Cisco in several business ventures. Only $1 million has come from the general public.

Kragen suggested that the organization may be hampered by its lack of a full-time administrator or full-time board of directors. It is currently being run by Cisco executives who still juggle corporate responsibilities and by a Web site manager seconded from the UNDP. They report to a temporary board of directors.

“There’s got to be someone whose full-time responsibility is NetAid,” Kragen said. “We’re in need of operational staff.”

The organization’s Web site at https://www.netaid.org apparently has attracted less attention than the organizers hoped. Although it was set up to handle as many as 60 million “hits,” or viewings, per hour during the Oct. 9 concerts, it has so far been accessed 40 million times in total. A Webcast of the concerts, during which as many as 10 million viewers were to be able to see the concert via the Internet, attracted fewer than 2.5 million viewers during its 11-hour span.

The Web site--which was to be the portal by which people could learn more about worldwide relief needs and contribute their time, money, or goods--has been criticized as confusing and unattractive.

“My view is that this is not a Web site designed by marketing people,” said Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the UNDP. “Now we have to make sure we have a much friendlier site.”

UNDP sources said the organization has applied to the Turner Fund, the $100-million-per-year endowment to the U.N. from entertainment magnate Ted Turner, for new funds to operate the site. A decision on the application has not yet been made, they said, but the site is scheduled for upgrading next month and a major overhaul of its “look and feel” in January.

For their part, UNDP officials say they believe NetAid has succeeded on its own terms. “Unequivocally, it’s been a great success,” said Robert Piper, a UNDP employee assigned to supervise the Web site. Cisco Systems executives have also said they believe the organization has had a successful launch and that they will continue to support it.

NetAid’s organizers have consistently said that raising money was not their top priority and that their effort has been unfairly compared with such campaigns as the “We Are the World” single, which raised $64 million for famine relief.

Rather, they viewed NetAid as a means of raising awareness in the general public of Third World poverty and development problems that could not be effectively addressed merely by short-term fund-raising appeals.

“We always insisted that this was about building a constituency of people who would get hooked on development,” said Brown of the UNDP. “It’s the difference between asking for a check because there’s a crisis or a concert to highlight a crisis versus trying to engage millions of people to build their support over time.”

Noting that one of the organization’s issues is relief of the $215 billion in debt owed by Third World countries to the industrialized world, he said, “Debt relief is not a matter of someone writing a check.”

Piper said the Web site would shortly start posting “classified ads” through which relief organizations could appeal for volunteers with specific skills or for specific goods and services needed for development projects. In January, he said, the site will unveil a major redesign undertaken by a professional Web design firm.

“I’m quite confident that the momentum of this thing is going to keep building,” Piper said.

Times staff writer Michael Hiltzik can be reached at michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.