Send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999

<i>BEFORE you RT that RedCross donation message or donate any cash yourselves... please consider.</i><p>Red Cross is a giant beast of a company. It is $600,000,000 in debt. It has ridiculous overhead.<p>As fellow hackers... We're all trying to build startups/ideas because we think big companies are missing something... that we have a better way to do things... that we can build a better product.<p>If you want to help Haiti. Give directly. I spent 2 years building a non-profit (a start-up if you will) that sets up volunteer centers in disaster areas. We are a super lean organization with an executive director that takes a $0 per year salary.<p>Donations are being gathered to directly help the people in Haiti.<p>Donations Can Be Made Here: <a href="http://bit.ly/HODR_Haiti" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/HODR_Haiti</a><p>Sorry to rant... but the RedCross-fest on Twitter right now is killing me.<p>EDIT: I created a new post with more info here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051914" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051914</a>

My family lived through the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, India which was of similar proportions. Based on their personal experience, the things immediately needed after an earthquake are:<p>1) Heavy earth moving equipment (to get people out from under the rubble) 2) Tents and blankets (it is cold) 3) Medicines 4) Food<p>Many organizations only focused on 2 and 4 in India. In the end, there was a glut of food, tents, clothes and blankets and not enough earth moving equipment and many people who could have been saved, died. The situation may be different in Haiti but they are an underdeveloped nation and I doubt they have as much equipment as is needed. I have already seen reports that there's a scarcity: <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0113/Haiti-earthquake-a-call-to-a-common-humanity" rel="nofollow">http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0...</a><p>Obviously medicine is also in short supply.<p>It may be a tall order to organize to get this there but at least we have someone here who has done it before. If dariusmonsef (or anyone else) can vouch for a group on the ground in Haiti who can actually manage these things well, it may be worth the effort to try to borrow these things ourselves and try to arrange for comped air transport.<p>I know some folks in the airline industry who I can ask about transporting the stuff for free.<p>Do you guys think this is doable and worth the effort?

Unless they're getting a deal on their payment processing for being a charity, I'd suggest taking the extra minute to go to their website. Credit card payments will cost them less than fifty cents of that $10. Cell phone providers charge <i>much</i> more.<p>Also, while charities love to use current events to drive fundraising appeals, their current disaster is almost universally paid for by funds they collected months ago. If you're going to give, give smart. (Relatedly, this is why sending non-monetary goods after a major disaster is perhaps less effective than you might wish it would be.)

I was curious about how this service works, mostly to know where the money is actually flowing. I Googled for awhile and came up with nothing, but thanks to randomwalker's post in this thread (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051844" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051844</a>), I was able to dig up some info. I summarized what I found here:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/aoyin/text_haiti_to_90999_to_donate_10_through_the_red/c0iqe8k" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/aoyin/text_haiti_t...</a><p>It's not definitive, but hopefully it'll help people make a more informed judgement about using this short code for donations.<p>p.s. this charity was mentioned on Reddit:<p><a href="http://www.pih.org/home.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pih.org/home.html</a><p>I'd never heard of it, but the founder, Paul Farmer, has a long history of working in and for Haiti.

hey, ive been playing around with an idea:<p>pixelsforhaiti / adsforhaiti.org<p>get sites to donate a small ad block that links to a donation/ways to help haiti page. obviously fully nonprofit. list all other sites/companies involved like they did with the nomoreie6 page. thoughts?

A good alternative option for a larger web based donation is Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, they are already on the ground and operational: <a href="http://bit.ly/7anR0x" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/7anR0x</a>

I'm curious about what short codes can carry extra charges like this. For regular phones, people are generally aware that 900 numbers are toll lines and you'll be charged for that, but for these text numbers I don't know what the rule is.<p>Seems like there's a lot of potential for scammers to tell people to text a certain number without telling people that charges would apply. At the student newspaper I used to work for, we told people to text "follow name" to 40404 (Twitter's short code) to get text message updates with news.

The International Federation of the Red Cross is a hypocritical organization. In Muslim countries it is called The Red Crescent (and any aid packages/vehicles are marked with a crescent moon).<p>Yet only one muslim country (Kuwait) figures (low down) in the accounts of top 25 donor countries for the IFRC for recent years. But 10 of the top 25 beneficiary countries are muslim. Thus the many of the donations from christian countries to an ostensibly christian emergency relief charity actually end up going to help muslims and are branded as aid from a muslim charity. (Either most of those oil-rich muslim countries aren't giving to charities, or they're only giving to charities that aid other muslims -- and it's probably the latter.)<p>I have no objection to people receiving aid whatever their religion (or lack of). But it disgusts me that that aid given to a "christian" charity uses the religious imagery of the donating country to raise money and ends up deceiving the recipients into believing it came from a muslim charity.<p>Donor and recipient end up being deceived by this duplicitous organization. Most people I've talked to about this have no idea that the IFRC is branded as the "Red Crescent" in muslim countries.<p>I prefer to support Médecins Sans Frontières. They seem far more honest about what they are doing.<p>The American Red Cross looks like it is not part of this IFRC duplicity.

has this method of collection been tried before? if not I'm guessing this is an untapped goldmine for the right entrepreneur: set up charities with simpler donation vectors.

Does anyone know if there is a Europe based phone number where it is possible to send donations (something similar to 90999)?

I've set up a small site at <a href="http://haitibizrelief.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://haitibizrelief.blogspot.com/</a> designed to give people a fast and easy way to donate, view donations through ChipIn, and to get some exposure for their startup or business.

Amazon also has a donation button on their home page for Mercy Corps to help victims of the Haiti earthquake.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/</a>