If you’ve been online, either on Twitter or Facebook or even just casually browsing the web over the last 2 days, you’ve no doubt doubt seen people posting a message similar to the following:
Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross relief efforts in #haiti.
Well, I was immediately intrigued seeing this. The outpouring of support over the last 48 hours has been tremendous. According to the American Red Cross, $5 Million has been donated to Haitian Relief Efforts. This is an incredible use of New Media tools. I would be curious to see the statistical breakdown of the people who supported, whether they were mostly adults or teens, male or female, etc. My hunch, is that the majority of donaters tended to age from 13-30.
If for some reason you haven’t seen these messages going around and want to get involved, here are two main efforts that you can support:
1. Text “haiti” to 90999
This will send a $10 donation to the Red Cross, through an effort backed by the U.S. State Department. Funds will go to support American Red Cross relief efforts in Haiti.
2. Text “Yele” to 501501
This will automatically donate $5 to the Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund. Yele is “a grassroots movement that builds global awareness for Haiti while helping to transform the country through programs in education, sports, the arts and environment.”
Utilize in Your Ministries
After seeing this phenomenon, I was curious to find out what types of services are out there that allow you to fundraise via texting. The guys over at MediaSalt sent a Tweet out earlier today to a post they wrote highlighting what they claimed to be the best company, mGive. mGive is also the company that the Red Cross is utilizing to handle their fundraising.
Fundraising Ideas
Earlier today, Chris wrote a post about the importance and need to connect through texting. One of the main roles that you play as a minister is finding a way to fund all of the ideas and activities that you would like to do to help teens grow in their faith. mGive is a wonderful tool to help you in this daily struggle.
I encourage you to give fundraising though texting a try. Use it to raise money for your next retreat or to help buy things for your youth group. Encourage people to make a small $5 donation via their cell phones. Donations are made by using your mobile phone’s text messaging service and the charge is automatically added to their monthly phone bill. Not only will you build a nice list of supporters phone numbers, but you can potentially raise a lot of money. There are a lot of people out there who would be happy to donate something so small as $5 or $10.
If you do give it a shot, come back and let us know how you did. Did it work for you? If not, why not?
