Mobile Giving: The Haiti Cataclysm
By Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf
February 8, 2010
Hurricane Katrina. The Indian Ocean Tsumani. The Haiti Earthquake. These are but three of the more recent natural disasters to devastate different regions on the planet. And throughout, Canadian citizens, charities, and nonprofits have responded with true north compassion, aid, and generosity.
When a magnitude 7.1 earthquake decimated Port-Au-Prince, Haiti on January 12, causing as-yet untold damage to the country’s infrastructure and, more poignantly, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, charities, NGOs, and nonprofits in Canada and around the world quickly activated their solicitation action plans to try to help the Haitian people.
Telethons were struck up. Traditional commercial messaging campaigns on TV, radio, and telephone were launched, but in 2010, a new medium was quickly alighted upon by those innovators in the sector: the mobile giving phenomenon. And as the following stats show, when a crisis occurs, it now pays to have access to a world of people with cell phones, iPhones, Blackberries, and various PDAs.
What’s your "Shortcode?"
Three short months ago, the Canadian arm of the Mobile Giving Foundation (MGF-C) launched in partnership with the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association to allow Canadian wireless service providers to “enable the 100% pass-through of funds raised by all the mobile campaigns that it manages."
"By texting a keyword to a designated short code via a mobile phone, a micro-donation of $5 or $10 can be made to aid the millions of people affected by the devastating earthquake. The entire donation goes to the recipient charity, and the donation appears as a charge on a donor’s carrier bill. Donors also receive information about how to obtain an official income tax receipt,” reports the foundation.
[Note: The US-based Mobile Giving Foundation started up in 2007.]
The current Haiti disaster has created what some people are dubbing a “watershed” moment regarding the boom in text donations. Though still nascent as a solicitation tool in Canada, the charities on the MGF-C list, as of last week, had raised more than $500,000 for the relief effort in Haiti. Charities involved with the foundation include the Canadian Red Cross Society, UNICEF Canada, The Salvation Army, PLAN Canada, and WorldVision Canada.
Touting the power of this new donation tool, a foundation spokesperson told CharityVillage last week it had amassed $35 million total for Haiti “collected through all mobile giving campaigns, but that number changes every day because at times we are receiving 10,000 text messages a second.”
In a release last week, MGF CEO and chairman Jim Manis applauded the participating Canadian charities as leaders in the text donation wave.
"The response for Haiti earthquake relief in Canada has been terrific, having raised more money in its first few days than the entire first year of mobile giving in the US in 2008." |
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“The response for Haiti earthquake relief in Canada has been terrific, having raised more money in its first few days than the entire first year of mobile giving in the US in 2008,” he said. “Given that MGF Canada only launched three months ago, the fact that Canadian operators were able to implement our mobile platform on their networks this quickly makes this number all the more impressive.”
Jumping on the text wagon as fast as they can
Speaking from their headquarters in Toronto, UNICEF Canada’s chief development officer Sharon Avery told CharityVillage that her organization hadn’t intended to launch their text-to-donate program with MGF-C until this month, but when the Haiti disaster struck, they moved up their plans and managed to get online at the end of January with some fast-tracking by the foundation.
As a result, she said, UNICEF Canada’s text-to-donate numbers are “much lower than some of our colleagues because we didn’t have it set up in advance.” Still, as of last week, they managed to raise $5,000 using the technology - out of a total of $11 million raised via the organization’s other channels - and anticipate that in the event of another disaster, they will be able to take advantage of public response and utilization of texting much more effectively.
“Now we’re including it in all our outdoor media,” Avery said. “The real success in emergencies is when you’re ready to receive. In the 'old' thinking, you were pushing all this [soliciting] out to get people to give. Now, you have to be ready to receive. Another major success is to get the website up, running, and ready to receive within the first two hours of the emergency.”
Avery said that as far as disaster planning goes, the lessons learned from the major crises of the last decade and the new Haiti text-to-donate option led most major charities to develop “fully-integrated” emergency response so that “all channels” are prepared to take in donations.
Over at WorldVision Canada, Public Relations Officer Molly Finlay said her organization, as of last week, had managed to raise $10,000 via text donations - out of a total of $12 million raised - adding that her organization also just began using the technology during this emergency.
Of all the charities on the MGF-C list, the Salvation Army has led the text-to-donate charge, receiving text donations of more than $230,000 out of a total of $3 million raised through all channels.
Andrew Burditt, the Salvation Army’s territorial public relations director for Canada and Bermuda also notes that his organization had only recently began its text-to-donate operations.
“We introduced this technology during our 2009 Christmas campaign but that was fairly small scale. The first real test has been our response to Haiti which has been very successful,” he said.
Get the text out
Though the initial surge of text-to-donate response by the public has cooled somewhat since the Haiti disaster struck, Avery, Finlay, and their colleagues in the sector all agree that charities need to seriously consider getting on board with text donation capability if they hope to tap into the generosity shown by Canadians if, heaven forbid, another emergency strikes.
Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.
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