Have a cell phone and want to help Haiti? It’s easy — just Text HAITI to the short-code 90999 and $10 will go to Red Cross and be billed to your account. Within 30 hours of launching the campaign, the Red Cross had already raised over $3 million and set a record for donations via SMS. Is this the beginning of a revolution in electronic fundraising?
The advantages of raising money this way are obvious: people’s phones are usually close at hand, meaning that we can move immediately to convert sympathy into action. And unlike most other forms of electronic donations, texting to a short code doesn’t require a credit card or even a bank account (a bartender friend of mine has neither but was still able to send in his $10).
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January 17th, 2010
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Be sure to check out Kate Harding’s recent Salon.com take on S.E. Cupp, a rising star in the right-wing punditosphere — and a non-blonde atheist, which makes her a bit of an outlier and a more interesting character than most of the cookie-cuttter talking heads that dominate Fox News. The most funnest part? Harding’s first paragraph relies on extensive quotes and paraphrases from Monday’s e.politics review of Tucker Carlson’s new “Daily Caller” site, including the excellent contributions by Josh Nelson (“a cross between ‘Politico, Drudge and the NY Post’”) and Roxanne Cooper (“Pajamas Media meets The Daily Beast”).
Kate links to the Huffington Post version of the article, which shows why it’s a good idea to publish articles like this one far and wide — you never know where someone’s going to find you. And while this means that Epolitics.com itself isn’t getting a direct traffic boost (or any Google Juice) out of the link, a quote in a top-level site like Salon never hurts. Very cool all around.
– cpd
January 17th, 2010
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