"With our issue, time is the enemy," says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Having recognized the speedy distribution capabilities of the Internet, several organizations that help recover missing kids this week started ambitious online information networks. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Lycos, and Safeguarding Our Children, LinkExchange, and Page Count, are hoping that more online eyeballs will mean more children returned safely to their homes.
"We think long term, cyberspace will be an even more powerful resource than television," says Allen. "First because of the explosion in [the] number of users, and also because in this medium we can reduce the lead time in getting information to the public from days to seconds."
Allen's organization, which works with the FBI and the Justice Department to track and find the 850,000 kids who are reported missing each year, already receives a million hits a day on its Web site. But it still wants more, and partnered with Lycos to create a searchable database of missing children for Lycos' 10 million monthly visitors. About 1,000 "critical" cases will be displayed in the database along with a running ticker of faces, which will also be advertised across the entire Lycos site. Although for now the only contact information is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's 800 number, organizers plan to have an anonymous email tip system in place by January.
"When you get milk cartons or see the back of coupons, if you live in Toledo but see a kid from New York City, you're not going to pay attention," says Jan Horsfall, VP of marketing for Lycos. "But if we put all the kids missing in Toledo in one place, you'll pay more attention."
Technology has proven to be key in recovering missing children in recent years. Allen attests that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's recovery rate has increased from 66 percent to 89 percent since 1990, when it started using artificial aging programs to manipulate the appearances of long-missing children, and set up a high-speed computer network to transfer information across the country, and on AOL.
The center's embrace of technology has been mirrored by similar organizations, and another missing children's alert program called the Web Emergency-Child Alert Network, which launched last week. Conceived by Safeguarding Our Children-United Mothers, a four-year-old nonprofit that serves as a resource for parents of abused kids, and Page Count, which provides free ad-supported statistical counters for Web sites, the Web Emergency-Child Alert Network is using banner distribution networks to place the faces of missing children on hundreds of thousands of Web sites.
Page Count, the LinkExchange ad-banner network, and the DigiWeb site hosting network have committed to replacing the ad banners across their networks with occasional missing children alerts. The organizers estimate that 10 million to 12 million viewers will see each alert: Page Count alone runs 2 1/2 million banners on 100,000 pages every day. The banners, which will show the missing child's face, will link to a printable flier with information about the case and contact information for the proper authorities.
"People want to help, and the best way to do that is to get information to them," explains Debbie Maloney, founder of the Web Emergency-Child Alert Network. "They can download information off the Internet - whereas they can't download it off television."
Of course, the question of just how often the alerts go out and how long they stay up is dependent on how it affects the companies that are donating their precious ad space.
"We have to meet a bottom line, so we don't fold and not help anyone," says Sal D'Ambra, CEO of Page Count. "We hope to keep the alerts up for a day, but we have to see how it hurts everyone, to be honest."
