Text message donations for Haiti disaster relief support continue to pour in to the Red Cross and Yele, the two non-profits which have set up text donation campaigns earlier this week. Today, the Red Cross campaign run by mGive, which asks for $10 donations via text message by texting “Haiti” to 90999, has netted $8 million and is still going strong.
According to officials, the American Red Cross mobile giving campaign passed the $7 million dollar mark late Thursday night and hit $8M today. Money is pouring in at the rate of $100,000 dollars an hour, according to the Red Cross. “As far as we know, this has broken all global mobile marketing campaigns in history,” US Red Cross spokeswomen, Abi Weaver, told AFP.
Wyclef Jean’s campaign, run by Give On The Go, which asks users to donate $5 by texting Yele to “501501,” to date has raised $1 million for the cause. Both campaigns are being promoted widely on Twitter as users continue to retweet posts about how to donate.
Previous mobile giving efforts aimed at large-scale disasters have not matched the impressive outpouring of support for these campaigns. According to a spokesman from Verizon Wireless, the previous two biggest mobile giving days amounted to $400,000, the total collected in August 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and $200,000 collected in December 2004 for tsunami relief efforts coordinated by CARE.