At 11:56 on 25 April 2015, Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati, a Nepalese photographer, was halfway through the last day of an oral history workshop in downtown Kathmandu when the ground started shaking. Within minutes of escaping from the building, she and some friends saw clouds of dust rising from the city. They were coming from the old town in the capital’s sister city Patan. She decided to see how she could help.
Thousands of miles away, Maia Ruth Lee, a Korean friend Gurung Kakshapati had known since they were both children growing up in Kathmandu, was fast asleep in her apartment in New York. Four hours later, she woke to a slew of panicked texts and emails.
“For a couple of days, I was in shock and just trying to make sure all my friends were OK,” says Lee. “But everyone kept asking, ‘How can I help?’ I’ve never fundraised before so I didn’t know what to say.”
At a loss, she set up an online fundraising platform. The next day, as Gurung Kakshapati’s efforts became a community wide response, Lee agreed to channel any funds to her and shared the appeal with friends via Instagram and Facebook. “I grew up in Kathmandu for 13 years,” she wrote. “The situation is desperate. I feel helpless being so far away, but I know that together we can help.”
This kind of hyperlocal philanthropy hasn't been possible before... We are at the tip of the iceberg of personal fundraising. The response, she says, was electric. Within a few days, she had collected $10,000. “I was stunned… I thought: Wow. This tool is really powerful.”
Nepal was ravaged by a 7.9-magnitude earthquake on April 25 that killed over 8,800 people and left over 100,000 injured, one million displaced and damaged some one million private and public houses, structures and buildings.
Lee is one of a new breed of disaster fundraisers who are leveraging personal networks via social media to raise and channel money directly to people in need on the ground. A scan of online fundraising platforms reveals hundreds of similar pages. There are Nepalis overseas raising funds for their village, climbers supporting Sherpa families, trekkers campaigning for communities they spent time with on holiday, and Nepalese doctors looking for support for their clinics and hospitals.
And the money is flooding in. Indiegogo Life, a platform launched only six months ago specifically for personal fundraising, says 750 people have started individual appeals for Nepal raising $2.5 million so far.
“It’s been our biggest single appeal to date,” says head of Indiegogo Life, Breanna DiGiammarino.
Another online fundraising platform, Global Giving, has recorded nearly $4 million raised to date. This is in line with the overall explosion in crowdfunding globally, an industry that grew in value from $1.5 billion in 2011 to $16.2 billion in 2014, according to industry research firm Massolution, with a further doubling projected in 2015. 
Why are personal online appeals proving so popular? One factor, says Alison Carlman of Global Giving, is increasing disillusionment with major NGOs, which were seen to waste money during the response to a 2010 earthquake in Haiti. 
“The backlash that happened after Haiti – it’s made people think more carefully about where they are giving money. People leave us comments saying, ‘Please use this money ethically. I want to make sure my money gets to the ground’.”
Lee found similar sentiments from an acquaintance who donated $3,000: “I’m pleased to support the right organisation,” the woman wrote. “I donated a huge sum to Haiti but I was so disappointed the money wasn’t spent in the right way.”
These platforms are also revolutionising fundraising for local organisations, enabling them to appeal directly for support from the giving public instead of waiting for an international organisation to make a grant. Setting up an appeal requires only a bank account, an internet connection and a few minutes. And the money can be provided extremely fast: Lee’s fundraiser, launched on 27 April, had raised thousands of dollars by 28 April, and the first tranche of money was in Nepal by 30 April, just five days after the quake.
Among the Nepalese organisations to have set up online appeals are Kathmandu Living Labs ($10,000 to date via Indiegogo), the American Nepal Medical Foundation ($468,323 also via Indiegogo) and the #WeHelpNepal platform, a network supporting local peer-to-peer Nepal-based earthquake response efforts, which has so far raised $462,000. Global Giving alone has recorded 70 projects posted as appeals by responding organisations.
But online platforms can also pose risks. Last year, GiveDirectly, a new online platform using a slightly different model – it sells itself as giving donors a direct link to “the extreme poor” – had donations stolen when a local employee colluded with others to skim money from what recipients were meant to receive. 
But for the Future of Humanitarian Funding (FHF), an initiative looking for innovative approaches to financing emergency aid delivery, these kinds of platforms are no more open to fraud than other kinds of fundraising, including via SMS or donations to major international organisations. In fact, they could well create new ways to tackle transparency. For example, the Yellow House, the organisation Gurung Kakshapati set up, started a Google Doc – updated daily to show all its spending – and emailed it to all those who donated.
“On a very simple level we felt accountable – these were individuals who were giving money, trusting us,” says Gurung Kakshapati. On her page, Lee posted frequent updates and pictures of the operation on the ground, including a report of a visit her mother paid to the Yellow House.
Global Giving offers a guarantee to all donors: “If you are unhappy with the way your funds are used – if, for example, you donated money for a school and the organisation decided to build a well instead – we will refund your donation up to $10,000 as a voucher,” says Carlman. “You can then redirect that funding to something that suits you better.” Because of the potential for scams and misuse of funding, Global Giving vets all the organisations on its platform.
Meanwhile Nepal has received pledges worth $4 billion by the international community, including Canada for its reconstruction following the devastating quake India announcing the largest amount of $1 billion in aid at the International Donors Conference on Reconstruction of the Himalayan nation recently.
The total requirement for the country's reconstruction was placed at $6.7 billion by the government in its Post Disaster Needs Assessment report and the Nepal government announced $2 billion as a startup fund immediately after the April 25 earthquake. 
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pledged to extend $480 million in the form of grant and loan. 
China also offered a concessional loan from the Silk Road Fund for Nepal's reconstruction effort. China would also offer training opportunities for 1,500 Nepalis over the next year.
Japan announced $260 million at the conference, and assured to organise the second donor conference to support Nepal's rebuilding effort. 
US Ambassador to Nepal Peter Bodde announced aid worth $130 million.
Norway announced $30 Million, Britain pledged $110 million, Canada promised $60 million, Switzerland $25 million, and South Korea $10 million. 
Pakistan has pledged $1 million and Austria announced $1.2 million in financial assistance. 
The Asian Development Bank pledged support of $600 million. EU pledged an additional support of 100 million euro ($111.94 million) as grant assistance.
The World Bank had said that it would provide up to $500 million to finance the reconstruction of Nepal.