How to donate to Haiti by text message?

On Tuesday January 12, 2010, Haiti was hit by a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake. US government and people show great sympathy to their poor Caribbean neighbor (the world does the same thing). A new phenomenon in relief effort, different from tsunami 2004 relief effort, is that people use text message to make donation to Haiti.

How can we make a donation to Haiti by text message? It's very simple. Send HAITI to 90999, then you make $10 donation to American Red Cross relief effort in Haiti. It was reported that until 1:00p.m., January 17, 2010, text message donation to American Red Cross relief effort had reached $7 million. An impressive number!

American Red Cross does a great job to make this innovative way to raise fund. Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson commented "These are donors who are typically the hardest to reach: young people. They're reacting to something that affects them and realizing their few dollars can make a difference. Texting has opened up a whole new world for philanthropy." American Red Cross also does a great job to market this donation method. Over the weekend when I watched the football game, I saw the advertisement on both CBS and Fox about text messaging to make donation to American Red Cross many times. TV audience know and execute this method extremely easily.

I searched around and could not find other humanitarian aid organizations such as Mercy Corps make similar donation push using text message. I hope that they will adopt this method soon.

$10 donation will show up on your mobile phone monthly bill. In Can we use mobile phone to pay?, I discussed that there will more and more chances that we need to use mobile phone to make payment. Right now, mobile phone carriers just passively put these donation payment on the monthly bill. It is actually a golden opportunity for carriers to make the new mobile payment service besides the voice and data service.

On TV, I saw some helicopters in Haiti drop package down. Even in poor countries, many people have cell phones now. Maybe donation cash can be distributed to these poor people directly through cell phone directly so that the cash can be delivered to people in great need. It is a direct donor-to-donee donation.

Update on January 18, 2010 : The WSJ article Quake Sets Back Haiti's Efforts to Improve Telecommunications reports that 35% of 9 million people living in Haiti have mobile phone, up from just 5% in 2006. So the mobile phone may play a role in donation such as the aforementioned direct donor-to-donee donation.