banktime.com

The generosity of American consumers has richly benefited the island nation of Haiti in the past seventy-two hours as our country reacts compassionately to the devastation following Tuesday’s massive earthquake. According to a Reuters report from San Francisco today, cellphone users alone have contributed more than ten million dollars to the cause, thanks to innovative text-message based billing to their next month’s phone bill. It’s a record set for mobile donations to a single cause, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation. The MGF also reported that Americans have sent an average of ten thousand texts per second to aid the cause. There is hope that Americans will continue giving at this rate for a while longer; ads featuring political and entertainment industry luminaries have begun to air urging people to give what they can.

The news that people can easily donate by their cell phone’s text messaging capabilities has spread like wildfire on social networking sites and especially Facebook, where users have urged one another to contribute to Haitian musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund by texting the word “Yele” to 501501, or to give ten dollars to the American Red Cross by texting the word “Haiti” to the number 90999. The donations are charged to the user’s cell phone bill during the next billing cycle. Many of the biggest wireless providers in the country (AT&T, Verizon, and Alltel among them) have announced that there will be no fees for this service, and that they will not be taking any fees off these texts. According to a representative of the American Red Cross, as much as eight million dollars of its total thirty-seven million dollars in donations so far have come from cell phone users. A spokeswoman for the association, Nadia Pontif, called the amount to date “unprecedented.”

The Mobile Giving Foundation says that its current project is decreasing the lag time between when mobile phone users text in their donation and when those monies are received by the charity of their choice. As of right now, those donations may take as long as three months to arrive at their intended destination. The Foundation says that mobile carriers are working closely with them on this effort.

Of course, giving to the charity of choice directly with your credit card is both quick and easy, as well as the way to ensure a speedy receipt of your donation. It is easy to go online and find the websites for charities doing what they can to help the Haitian rescue efforts.

According to the reports believed to be most accurate at the moment, at least ten percent of residential housing in the Haitian capital of Port au Prince was destroyed, making about 300,000 Haitian citizens homeless, but in some areas as many as half of all buildings were either destroyed or badly damaged. Death tolls could top one hundred thousand, it is believed. Today’s afternoon marks the end of the critical three-day window after which people buried under rubble will likely start perishing from lack of food, water, and medical attention, so aid efforts are extremely frantic at the moment.