Czech charity ADRA raises $ 500,000

The Czech charity ADRA, which is raising money for tsunami victims through text messages, has been overwhelmed by the response. Since ADRA launched its appeal last week, it has received nearly 500,000 text messages, representing more than $500,000 in aid, according to Radio Free Europe.

"This charity text-messaging project was launched by the 'Donors' Forum,' which is an organization that groups all the major charities in the Czech Republic," ADRA's Vitezslav Wurst said. "As an organization that represents many foundations, the Donors' Forum opened negotiations with the country's mobile-phone operators and a joint project was created, which allowed people to donate money by sending text messages."

Wurst said that text messaging has the potential to revolutionize how charities fundraise. But the campaign has to be planned carefully.

"In order for such a project to be successful, you need to have several elements," Wurst said. "The media have to be partners because without any publicity in the media, no project like this can be successful -- you end up only addressing a small group of people and that's the end of the effort. The next group that helped us a lot was all the Internet servers that displayed our banner on their Internet pages. Everyone that clicks on our banner on the Internet finds out about the option of making a text-message donation. So it's important to secure media publicity. Once you have that, you need to ensure transparency. This is essential, so that the public and your partners can be sure they are dealing with a serious project."

Related:

-- Roundup of tsunami relief SMS fund raising campaigns around the world

-- Other (unrelated to tsunamis) fund raising campaigns by SMS

-- Links to all Tsunami/cell phone stories posted in Textually.org.

emily | 6:14 PM | Tsunamis, South East Asia |
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2005/01/006619.htm