The reporter makes a $10 text donation to Partners in Health, a humanitarian organization working in Haiti to help in the earthquake rebuilding efforts. (Photo by Naomi Abraham/CNS)

Since as early as 2008, some nonprofit organizations, mainly big agencies like the United Way of America and the Red Cross, added texting to their arsenal of fundraising strategies.  But it wasn’t until the earthquake in Haiti that a wider spectrum of the American public got to know and participate in text donations.  Text donations for Haiti currently stand at around $32 million, a world text drive record.

The devastation in Haiti was hard to ignore: The earthquake killed 200,000 and leaving tens of thousands more injured and homeless.  According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, more than $644 million has been raised by American organizations.  Though text donations accounted for less than 10 percent of total contributions, texting may have allowed a greater demographic to participate in the relief efforts.  Through $5 or $10 donations that were charged directly to the donor’s cell phone bill, people could put their money where their heart was.   Immediately following news of the earthquake, $5 million worth of donations were made via text in less than two days.

The United Way of America, in partnership with the NFL, first used texting to raise money for a youth fitness program. During the 2008 Super Bowl, the United Way took a coveted 10-second spot asking for donations to its program. It was the first large-scale text drive, though only $10,000 was raised during the game. A year later Alicia Keys made an appeal on “American Idol,” which raised $450,000 for Keep A Child Alive, an organization that provides HIV treatment for children affected by AIDS in Africa.

The Women’s Media Center, a New York based nonprofit that advocates for fair representation of women in the media, recently started a donate-through-text program precisely because it wanted to make it easy for people who were not inclined to donate online or through another channel. Michaela Monohan, a fundraising staff member at the organization, says their efforts have been good for getting smaller donations but she already sees the limitations. “I think mobile giving is most effective when you are dealing with a huge constituency given the monthly costs of the technology.” Her organization pays $399 a month to mGive, a wireless provider that services nonprofit organizations seeking to raise funds through texting.

The fundraising success with Haiti coupled with the fact that 90 percent of Americans now have cell phones woke the nonprofit sector to the possibilities of cellular technology. Many of these nonprofits started to wonder how they could get in on the game especially with decreased funding, as a result of the recession. But after doing the research, many of these groups are finding that it may not make sense for their organizations to dive in.

Currently, text donation services are being used mainly by multimillion dollar operations, not smaller operations like the Institute of Popular Education. Cynthia Peredes, development director of the Los Angeles based grassroots organization that works with low-income immigrants, says that her curiosity was piqued by the Red Cross success, but through a quick online research she determined that with the high upfront costs and monthly fees, which are paid to providers such as mGive and that could range from $3,000 to $10,000, it would not be a logical step for her organization.

But even if Peredes and her organization decided to try their luck, they would not have fulfilled the requirements of the wireless industry. To be approved a nonprofit has to work with an approved third party vendor, which determines whether an organization meets stringent requirements, one of which is that the organization’s budget must be above $500,000. Still, organizations that fall outside the eligible margin were not sure they wanted to take the risk.

According to Mashable, an online media guide, 5 to 10 percent of an organization’s fundraising revenue will be shared with the wireless company and a third party vendor. What’s more, to date, the organizations that have really benefited from text donations are those that have had a celebrity champion, a good media blitz or some catastrophe like the earthquake in Haiti. Also, since donations are capped at $10, it may reduce giving by active donors who might want to give more.

“The texting strategy really came out of the Obama campaign,” says Randy Punley, director of corporate and media partnerships with United Way of America.

While Punley prides his organization as being the pioneer of text giving, he says the Obama campaign made it jell for people in the nonprofit world. The Obama campaign didn’t have a text giving program, but used text to garner support both in the electoral and monetary sense. Punley believes that the immediacy of text messages helped create an intimacy that encouraged giving online and through more traditional avenues.

“A cell phone is a channel for communication, it’s not a credit card,” Punley says. For texting to really be useful, nonprofits must see it as a way to sustain engagement, which he believes will translate to more giving.

Judy Peake, CEO of OnPR, a public relations firm that represents mGive, a Denver-based entity that builds mobile giving technology, says that many of the individuals who donated to Haiti may not have done so if it weren’t for the simplicity of a text transaction. Peake says that the mobile donation is still in the early stages and there is a lot more that nonprofits can do with the emerging technology.

“The next wave of smart phones will make it easy for charities to collect vital donor data during the initial giving process,” Peake says, “It is a powerful way to build a community and a new generation of donors.”