Help Haiti via SMS donations

Inspired by a report a few days ago in the New York Times on how making donations via text message on mobile phones in the US to support relief efforts in earthquake-devastated Haiti had raised over $2 million in donations, I wondered on Twitter if anyone was looking at making this idea work in the UK.

I even asked Vodafone and O2 directly what they thought of the idea. O2 said they were actively looking at it. I didn’t hear from Vodafone.

So I was very pleased to hear from my Twitter friend Mummabear a short while ago that a text donation service via SMS in the UK is now active.

And it has been set up and organized by O2. Nice one, O2.

If you’re in the UK on a UK mobile network, you create a text message with the single word GIVE as the message body. Then you send it to 70077, which goes to the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organization for 13 humanitarian aid agencies in the UK.

If the send succeeds, you get an acknowledgement.

I’ve donated my £5. Ironic that my mobile operator for the mobile phone I used to send the text message is Vodafone over whose network my message went.

How about donating your network charge to the fund-raising, Vodafone?

Another means to contribute: the easier you make it and the more means there are for people to do it, the more likely it is that more people will.

And Haiti needs all the help they can get, large or small.