Crisis launch · Healthcare

Why would a cancer charity take on COVID-19?

In spring 2020 most Russian nonprofits were losing donations. Ours, an oncology foundation with no infectious disease experience, launched a COVID-19 helpline in a week and a half, and its online donations doubled.

Cancer Prevention Foundation · 2020 ·
My role
Everything digital: the helpline, defeatcovid.ru, the donation pages. Plus the volunteer doctors: recruiting, preparing, training, shifts.
Team
9 foundation staff, 5 people from the Breadhead agency, 100+ volunteer doctors
Timeframe
A week and a half to launch, March 2020
The constraint
A cancer foundation with no infectious disease expertise, in the middle of a panic.

If you only read one thing

When COVID-19 hit, our oncology foundation stepped outside its field and launched a COVID-19 helpline with volunteer doctors in a week and a half. The tools we had turned out not to fit, so we rebuilt on the fly. While 60% of nonprofits in a CAF survey saw donations fall, our online donations doubled.

The situation

I worked at a cancer prevention nonprofit in St Petersburg. Its work was oncology: prevention, training oncologists, and Prosto Sprosit, a service where oncologists answer patients in writing.

In March 2020 COVID-19 reached Russia. People were frightened, donors were cancelling, and nobody knew what came next. In March and April, 60% of Russian nonprofits in a CAF survey saw donations fall, and for one in five of those the drop was over 80%.

The fork

Option A

Stay in our lane

We were a cancer foundation with no infectious disease expertise. Protect the core programmes and wait it out, like most of the sector.

Option B · chosen

Take on COVID-19

Use what we had, a consultation service and a network of doctors, to answer the question everyone was asking.

The demand was obvious, and we thought we already had the tools. That second part turned out to be wrong.

What shipped

Prosto Sprosit was built for questions that can wait a few days. COVID-19 questions could not: most people wanted to know whether to call an ambulance, and ambulances were overloaded. So we dropped the form and moved to live chats on defeatcovid.ru, with doctors on day and night shifts. A chatbot and prepared articles took the repetitive questions first.

The missing expertise we recruited. In the first days 172 volunteers signed up, more than 100 of them doctors, including 24 infectious disease specialists. Recruiting, preparing and training them and building the shift schedule was on me, along with all of the digital side, including the donation pages.

What happened

1.5 weeksto launch
53 → 103questions on day one and by day three
~2,000requests answered by January 2021
2xonline donations, while most nonprofits lost them

Online donations to the foundation went from about $12.7K a month in January and February 2020 to $24.8K in March to May. Large corporate gifts came through the foundation's fundraisers and are not counted here.

Online donations to the foundation, before and after launch thousand US dollars per month, average · 2020

0
$10K
$20K
$30K
Jan–FebMar–May
Card donations through the foundation's sites. Source: the foundation's monthly financial reports.

Sources

All money on this page is in US dollars, converted from roubles at one fixed rate, 62.8 ₽ per dollar (Bank of Russia average for January and February 2020), so the rouble’s fall in March doesn’t distort the before-and-after comparison.

The takeaway

In a crisis, the cautious move is to shrink back to your core. Going where the need is can be the safer bet, as long as you are ready to rebuild the tools you thought you already had.

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