Text to Donate: Organizations Use SMS for Haiti Earthquake Relief Efforts
Immediately after the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti yesterday afternoon, many global relief efforts popped up on Twitter and Facebook. This use of social media is not entirely surprising, but what about the impact of mobile and text message donations? Last night, the Red Cross tweeted:
You can text "HAITI" to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts in #haiti.
Once you send this text-message, your cell phone bill is automatically charged for the $10. But how many of us have actually responded to text message donations previously? This time proves to be especially notable. The Red Cross pledged an initial $200,000 donation and increased that amount this morning to $1 million.
Many other news organizations have aimed their efforts to organize the conversations about the Haiti disaster on Twitter. The Huffington Post created a Twitter List surrounding the topic.
Musician and Haitian-born Wyclef Jean has a foundation called, "Yele Haiti," which is also utilizing a similar text-message donation effort. He continues to encourage the masses to donate through his tweets:
Help Haiti Earthquake Relief Donate $5 by texting YELE to 501 501 right now.
We can assume that he has also made an impact and raised mobile efforts by his 1+ million Twitter followers alone. In light of this natural disaster and tragedy, the immediacy of social media and text messaging has had a positive influence in less than 24 hours.
