The number of people infected with the coronavirus across the globe has exceeded 2.5 million. The pandemic has affected all countries, with every one of them responding to it in its own way. Sweden and Belarus refused to take any quarantine measures, whereas other states attempted to defeat COVID-19 by imposing restrictions, with varying degrees of success. Any form of support in the struggle against the virus has been welcomed: Mongolia donated funds to Italy, Estonia shipped face masks to Spain, and the Russian Army helped Italy as well. However, such efforts were not made just by state authorities; socially responsible businesses also rose to the occasion.

Fighting the coronavirus – FONBET'S experience

Probably the most efficient form of charity is targeted aid, allowing specific people or companies to obtain what it is that they most desperately need. This was the principle that the international betting company FONBET followed when it decided to support the fight against the coronavirus in Russia.

"We provide targeted and specific aid in order to cut through red tape," FONBET CEO Alexander Paramonov said, while also further specifying the target recipients. "Our aid will be directed to charitable foundations which help prevent and control the coronavirus pandemic and to social institutions in different regions of the country – children's homes, psychoneurological care facilities, retirement homes, and homeless shelters," he specified.

The company's charity department was then charged with identifying potential aid recipients and their specific needs. The betting company already had the infrastructure for charitable support: since late 2017, FONBET has been implementing its "Betting on Good Deeds" program, with its page on the company's website and email [email protected] used to request assistance.

The company identified who was the most vulnerable to the coronavirus disease and most in need of assistance. This category includes regional and rural hospitals, regional infant homes and boarding schools, senior homes, hospices and similar institutions located across Russia's huge territory. As it happens, senior homes turned out to be among those most at risk everywhere in Europe as well; the elderly accounted for a substantial share of patients who died from COVID-19 in European countries.

However, even such an extensive list of those who needed help did not override the principle of providing only closely targeted aid. FONBET employees note that "even while enlisting the services of numerous charitable foundations, we strictly oversaw and continue to oversee which specific institution receives our assistance and how exactly allocated funds are spent." The employees of the charity department even occasionally contacted aid recipients personally to make sure they had actually received support. FONBET published information about all of its efforts in the fight against coronavirus in the Russian Federation on a special landing page, listing all the projects and the amounts spent on them. Thus FONBET ensured mutual transparency: the company monitors its charitable spending while people can see the destination of these funds.

Here are a few quotes from the charity news feed. April 29th: buying children's clothes for a social rehabilitation center in Vladimir Region (which is about the size of Albania and has the population a little larger in number than Estonia). April 30th: buying personal protective equipment for a hospital in Buynaksk (a town in the part of Russia known as the Republic of Dagestan). Transfer of funds aimed to provide medical equipment for the "Children of the Sun" hospice located not far from Moscow. Clearly, the geographical footprint is incredibly broad.

When the pandemic started to spread more quickly, the company realized the crucial need for personal protective equipment: face masks, protective lab-coats, shoe covers, respirators, disinfectants, and sanitizers. FONBET charity workers admit that these things were in short supply everywhere. However, personal protective equipment was and still remains an ongoing need in a number of countries in Europe and across the world – the shortage proved to be a universal distress.

"Another problem made itself felt soon – on-duty medical staff could not work normally because they lacked basic items: folding beds, bedsheets, drinking water coolers, good warm food," FONBET employees say. The company was promptly able to arrange lunch delivery to Moscow hospitals which admitted coronavirus patients. These included the Nikolay Pirogov City Clinical Hospital, the Nikolay Sklifosovsky Research Institute of Emergency First Aid, and many others.

However, this is not the full extent of the company's charitable activities. The scale of the pandemic in Russia made FONBET realize that such work had to be continued. Originally, the funds allocated for the charity program amounted to USD 450,000, slated to be spent before May 2020. But the coronavirus pandemic refused to give up that easily. "This situation will persist in Russia. Meanwhile, the number of potential aid recipients is growing every day, instead of dropping," the company decided, and boosted the amount of funding to the equivalent of USD 730,000.

FONBET's experience in Russia may be valuable for other companies thinking about how to make their charity activities more effective. Targeted aid, continual oversight, mutual transparency, and a willingness to keep on providing support while it is needed – this is a brief summary of what has been achieved by the company to date.