A new local company is helping to fill a gap in the humanitarian relief process, allowing relief
agencies, such as Save the Children, to get the supplies needed to help earthquake victims in Haiti.

ReliefQuote.com, based in Peterborough, was launched in July by Peter Hoekstra and Paul Lucas to connect relief agencies with suppliers.

Their business allows those agencies to efficiently get the materials that will help in disaster-stricken areas around the world. The idea for the business came from Hoekstra, who has worked with relief agencies over the past 20 years and noticed the difficulty some agencies had finding the supplies they needed to provide help.

These organizations often had to rely on e-mails and phone calls to connect with suppliers, a process that takes time and doesn’t guarantee the best results, he said. So, this summer Hoekstra sought the help of Lucas, who has a background in Web site development, to help solve the problem.

“[Hoekstra] and I got to talking, and decided to get together and design a system where non-governmental organizations and other nonprofits can use the system to create a request for a quote to get the supplies they need,” Lucas said.

“The computer program we wrote looks for suppliers in our database and matches them to the buyer. The buyer then decides if they would like to invite any of the suppliers to submit
a quote.”

Relief agencies looking for supplies, like tents, sleeping pads, clothing and toiletries, can log in to ReliefQuote.com to create a request for a quote instead of having to spend time looking for businesses who are selling these items in bulk.In many cases several suppliers submit quotes, allowing relief agencies to choose the best option — a process that will save these organizations money and provide accountability, Lucas said.

“The whole idea is to do it in a secure way that can be measured and monitored so these nonprofits can be accountable to their donors,” Lucas said.

The site will also allow all the separate field offices of larger organizations to coordinate their purchases. Helping the organizations that are supporting the relief operations in Haiti has been the Web site’s first real challenge, Lucas said.

“It’s been a real eye-opener. The activity on our Web site tripled during the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. We’ve probably had tens of millions of dollars worth of quotes go through the system to help out with the earthquake.”

The site went live last July, and the urgent needs of relief agencies responding to the earthquake have spurred the site to grow much faster than its developers anticipated.

“Once the earthquake hit, our phones started ringing because there were organizations looking for suppliers that we didn’t have in the database yet,” Lucas said. “Just in the last week they needed some school supplies, so we did some researching and found some new suppliers.”

ReliefQuote.com charges a $50 subscription fee for suppliers to use the service, but Hoekstra and Lucas decided any time there’s a relief emergency, like the recent earthquake, there will be no cost for any of the parties to use the system.

“At this point we’re doing OK financially. We’re bringing in slightly more money than is going out, but at this point we’re only at a fraction of where we think we can be,” Lucas said. “If you’re going to make money for something, it’s great to make money helping people help other people.”