

Send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999 - stuntgoat
http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.94aae335470e233f6cf911df43181aa0/?vgnextoid=15c0c5a210826210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD

======
dariusmonsef
_BEFORE you RT that RedCross donation message or donate any cash yourselves...
please consider._

Red Cross is a giant beast of a company. It is $600,000,000 in debt. It has
ridiculous overhead.

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.

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.

Donations are being gathered to directly help the people in Haiti.

Donations Can Be Made Here: <http://bit.ly/HODR_Haiti>

Sorry to rant... but the RedCross-fest on Twitter right now is killing me.

EDIT: I created a new post with more info here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051914>

~~~
alnayyir
Thanks for your work, I despise the Red Cross.

~~~
kqr2
Red Cross CEO earns $565,000 in salary.

What's interesting is that this is higher than the CEO cap the Obama
administration placed on for-profit companies which received bailout money.

The Red Cross received $100 million in bailout money.

[http://blog.charitynavigator.org/2009/02/non-profit-ceo-
pay-...](http://blog.charitynavigator.org/2009/02/non-profit-ceo-pay-and-
government.html)

[http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...](http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3277)

~~~
natrius
CEO pay means nothing. What matters is how much good they do per dollar. I'm
sure the amount of money they receive each year is available somewhere, and
they'll be happy to tell you what they've accomplished with it. Compare _that_
to other organizations instead of assuming they're ineffective because they
think it's worthwhile to pay their CEO well.

The magnitude of CEO pay in the private sector is similarly a non-issue, but
please keep my opinion on that to yourselves, lest the pitchforks be
redirected toward me.

~~~
kqr2
You're right that CEO pay doesn't mean that much in the scheme of things
especially if they increase the effectiveness of the organization, but it's an
issue that concerns people who make a lot less and are deciding where they
should donate their hard earned dollars.

<http://www.slate.com/id/2220596>

Non-profits also use their allure of helping others to recruit and often pay
rank and file employees less than market rate wages (see some comments in the
slate article).

For example, doctors who work for these organizations could likewise be making
$100's of K per year. Some doctors also work much harder than their market
counterpart, performing more surgeries under difficult conditions.

~~~
Retric
I suspet the CEO is getting a lower percentae of market rate than the average
doctor working for the red cross.

------
ajju
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:

1) Heavy earth moving equipment (to get people out from under the rubble) 2)
Tents and blankets (it is cold) 3) Medicines 4) Food

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: [http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-
view/2010/0...](http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-
view/2010/0113/Haiti-earthquake-a-call-to-a-common-humanity)

Obviously medicine is also in short supply.

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.

I know some folks in the airline industry who I can ask about transporting the
stuff for free.

Do you guys think this is doable and worth the effort?

~~~
Tichy
Ultimately these things happen because somebody decides to do them. Major hats
off to anyone who just acts in such a situation.

------
patio11
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 _much_ more.

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.)

~~~
nreece

      Cell phone providers charge much more.
    

100% of your $10 donation passes thru to RedCross for Haiti relief. Your cell
carrier keeps nothing.

<http://twitter.com/RedCross/status/7720590281>

~~~
nicpottier
Right.. for those curious why this makes sense for carriers. Just think how
much carriers charge for txting. Anything that gets people using SMS is a win
in their book.

~~~
Tichy
I suppose texting doesn't really cost the carriers anything. So why shouldn't
they for once just decide to give it away for a good cause?

Don't they also allow emergency calls for free? (Could be state regulation,
but still).

------
dhess
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
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051844>), I was able to dig up some
info. I summarized what I found here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/aoyin/text_haiti_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/aoyin/text_haiti_to_90999_to_donate_10_through_the_red/c0iqe8k)

It's not definitive, but hopefully it'll help people make a more informed
judgement about using this short code for donations.

p.s. this charity was mentioned on Reddit:

<http://www.pih.org/home.html>

I'd never heard of it, but the founder, Paul Farmer, has a long history of
working in and for Haiti.

------
jasonlbaptiste
hey, ive been playing around with an idea:

pixelsforhaiti / adsforhaiti.org

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?

------
poutine
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: <http://bit.ly/7anR0x>

------
albertsun
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.

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.

------
coolestuk
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).

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.)

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.

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.

I prefer to support Médecins Sans Frontières. They seem far more honest about
what they are doing.

The American Red Cross looks like it is not part of this IFRC duplicity.

~~~
ElliotH
But a big part of the Christian message is to give what you can to those who
need it. Note that it doesn't at any point say in the Bible 'Give money only
to Christians in need' and because of this the 'Donor being decieved' isn't
especially important.

However, I disagree that anybody is really being decieved at all, it is
readily available knowledge that the Red Cross give money under the Red
Crescent branding in muslim countries.

It would also make no sese at all to brand themselves at Red Cross in muslim
countries - the symbology would have no meaning to the locals at all.

------
nazgulnarsil
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.

~~~
randomwalker
I was more curious about the business of the middleman in this process, and I
looked into it earlier today. This particular short code operator, mGive
(<http://www.mgive.com/>) focuses on charities and was launched 2 years ago.
I'm guessing this is their first big exposure.

Wikipedia has the basics of setting up a new short code: "Common short codes
in the U.S. are administered by NeuStar, under a deal with Common Short Code
Administration - CTIA. Short codes can be leased at the rate of $1000 a month
for a selected code or $500 for a random code." (from
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code>)

More info here: <http://www.mmaglobal.com/shortcodeprimer.pdf>

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

~~~
hendler
Don't know, but google search looked promising
[http://www.google.com/search?q=SMS+text+donation+money+Europ...](http://www.google.com/search?q=SMS+text+donation+money+Europe)

------
jason_tko
I've set up a small site at <http://haitibizrelief.blogspot.com/> 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.

------
kqr2
Amazon also has a donation button on their home page for Mercy Corps to help
victims of the Haiti earthquake.

<http://www.amazon.com/>

~~~
qohen
Given the demographics here, perhaps this might be of interest: Jimmy Jean-
Louis, who plays "The Haitian" on the TV series, Heroes, is actually from
Haiti (and has family affected by the quake) he runs a charity called
Hollywood Unites for Haiti: <http://www.hufh.org/>

(I know little about the charity beyond what I read on its website but, again,
thought it might be of interest to people here).

Related (via reddit.com):
[http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/13/jimmy.louis.haiti/?...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/13/jimmy.louis.haiti/?hpt=Sbin)

