Officials at the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan didn't know how well their online donation matching campaign would work when it opened Tuesday morning.
Turns out it worked almost too well. So many people wanted to donate to a list of 75 Detroit-area arts and cultural organizations that they crashed the Community Foundation's Web site. And the connection remained slow and spotty the rest of the day.
The foundation also put up a backup site at
http://cfsem.guidestar.org in addition to its main site at www.cfsem.org.
Despite all the troubles, the foundation ran through its $1 million in matching funds for the donations by 3:21 p.m. Tuesday. The foundation matched each gift of $25 to $10,000 at 50 cents on the dollar, meaning a total of $3 million was raised.
And the foundation decided to add another $250,000 in matching funds and resumed the campaign at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
"We're doing that for a couple of reasons," said foundation president Mariam Nolan. "One is, it was a frustrating day for a lot of people who wanted to give, and we're sorry for that, and one way to say we're sorry is to put out more money. We don't want people who care not to be able to help the organizations they care about. "
Nolan said the foundation "had no idea" the online gift campaign would prove so popular.
"The organizations very effectively used the Web for outreach, so they get the credit," she said. "They learned how to do it and got very good at it."
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