Donations from Mobile adds millions in Relief Funds

Bangalore: Making charity appeal in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, several Americans are reaching for their cellphones to make a donation via text message. And plenty of them are then spreading the word to others on sites like Twitter and Facebook, reports the New York Times.

The American Red Cross, which is working with a mobile donations firm called mGive, said that it had raised more than $5 million this way. "There is an enormous outpouring for this effort," said Wendy Harman, Social Media Manager at the Red Cross. "It's such an easy way to give and pass around through social sites on the Web." The mobile donations are part of a larger surge of money flowing to the relief effort. The Red Cross said that it had collected nearly $35 million as of Thursday night, surpassing the amounts it received in the same time period after Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Also, many companies are lending their hands - Google pledged $1 million to UNICEF and other charitable organizations, while Microsoft promised $1.25 million in cash and donations as well as technical support for relief groups in Haiti. "When something like this happens, it's incredibly frustrating because there isn't much that we can do," said Laura Fitton, a Media Consultant who has raised money for charity on Twitter. "It helps to be able to at least make a gesture, and that is what is catching on."

The Red Cross solicited text-message donations as part of other relief efforts, with the biggest amount, $190,000, raised after Hurricane Ike in 2008. None of those caught on like the efforts for Haiti. Convenience is one factor in the campaign's success. People simply send a designated word to a five or six-digit number and then confirm that they want to give, and the donation is charged to their wireless bill. At the end of the month, the carriers transfer the contributions to a service provider like mGive, which passes them on to the charity.

As reported by the New York Times, some of the major wireless carriers, including AT&T and T-Mobile, are encouraging donations by waiving the cost of the text messages. And mGive says it will not charge its usual fees, so all of the money will go to the Red Cross. Similarly, MasterCard, Visa and American Express said on Thursday that they would waive transaction fees for some charitable donations to the relief efforts.

Moreover, the cellphone carriers and mGive said that they were working to accelerate the flow of funds. "We've been looking since yesterday at how to speed up the process for this particular situation," said Jeffrey Nelson, a Spokesman for Verizon Wireless. He said that the company was working on a system that would advance the contributions.

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