When it comes to donating to charities, a few fundamental problems exist. One: There are millions of them. Two: Not too many of us have millions of dollars to donate. Three: Life’s busy. We might be out of town during the Walk for a Cure, might not have time to call in during the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon, might forget we wanted to fish out our credit cards and donate to that charity we heard about last week. Lucky for us — and the world at large — technology is stepping in to help.
In 2010, we witnessed a revolution in how we donate to charity when text messages generated $5 million for the Red Cross alone just two days after Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake (according to Mashable.com). In fact, the Washington Post reported that funds raised from text messaging has, to date, generated more than $40 million to support disaster relief in Haiti. Some of the world’s largest and most influential nonprofit organizations have adopted the medium as a way to raise donations for relief efforts in Haiti including UNICEF, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and Oxfam America.
With that kind of staggering success, it’s hard to argue that donating to charity via text message won’t become the norm, as our country becomes more and more technologically advanced and our collective attention spans become shorter and shorter. Texting works because it’s quick and immediate: see the number while you’re watching TV, pick up your phone, punch it in, hit “send” and you’re done. In less than half a minute, you might have just saved someone’s life. Additionally, most donations made via text message are just $5 or $10 and are added on to your cell phone bill as an extra charge, making people much more likely to donate.
The Mobile Giving Foundation (MGF), founded in 2007, is the brains behind this operation. Touting itself as the “’glue’ between a charitable giving campaign, the wireless industry and the 250 million wireless users in the United States,” it’s helped establish mobile campaigns for Haiti and, just as recently as last weekend, established a mobile campaign to raise funds for relief efforts in Chile as the country’s residents recover from another devastating earthquake.
MGF’s process for carrying out these mobile campaigns works like this: the MGF develops a campaign for a nonprofit organization, assigns it a keyword (like HAITI) and a short code (like 90999) then sends it on to wireless carriers’ SMS centers. Those wireless carriers collect 100% of the funds generated from the campaign and send them back to MGF, who then makes sure the nonprofit gets that 100% within 30 days of when the funds were received. Post-donation, of course, MGF gets its cut by charging the nonprofit for “short-code costs, reporting and messaging charges.” So it’s a situation in which all parties win: donors get an easy way to make a difference, nonprofits benefit by seeing near-instant increases in donations and the MGF makes an honest buck.
In addition to relief efforts in Haiti and Chile, the MGF has ongoing campaigns for organizations such as the American Heart Association, the Children’s Miracle Network and the Make-a-Wish foundation. You can see a full list of participating charities and their associated keywords and short codes online at
http://mobilegiving.org
While text messaging certainly makes the process easier, the act of donating is all too often a luxury that some simply can’t afford – especially in today’s economic climate. And for those who give charity as a gift to others by donating in the name of someone else, it’s a great gesture – but a passive one, one in which the donor might not even feel passionate about or connected to the charity that he or she’s just “donated” to. To address these problems, we turn to Kevin Bacon.
Who doesn’t like Kevin Bacon? First of all, his last name is Bacon. Second of all, his namesake game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” taught us how to make a big, unfamiliar world seem downright intimate. A new version of “Six Degrees,” has emerged, though, and this one’s a charitable initiative undertaken by Bacon aimed to help us link ourselves to others for the purpose of a greater good, via “Good Cards.”
Preloaded with the giver’s choice of any amount between $10 and $250 and available in bulk up to 100 at a time, Good Cards are essentially gift cards for charities, and, according to the site, can be “redeemed as a donation to any of more than 1.2 million charities.” And in addition to being eco-friendly (the cards can be emailed, as well as mailed and printed out), Good Cards make a difference on more than one level: one person buys the card as a gift for another person, who receives that gift and gives it to a charity of his or her choice, who receives that donation and then uses it to help give support to an important cause.
Good Cards were developed by Bacon through an organization he partnered with called Network for Good, which aims to advance and enhance the act of donating to charity online, taking it beyond just equipping a charity’s website with an e-commerce system to process online donations. Network for Good has created something called a “Charity Badge,” which is basically a widget you can display for your website or social networking site like Facebook. This Charity Badge, according to Network for Good’s website, “allows you to raise awareness and money for any cause you care about,” because by including it on your site, you’re also allowing users to click on it to donate directly to that cause.
A Charity Badge can be personalized to include a photo and a description of why you’re promoting your cause, and it can be set up to track and display the donations you’re raised in real time. You can also find an organization you want to support right on the Network for Good site, where they’ve set up a search for charities by name, keywords and state. If you choose to donate to a charity directly through the Network for Good site, they’ll store your donation history (making that tax write-off way easier) and save lists of your preferred charities.
Seems like it’s only a matter of time before the entire world is within six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
