Nonprofits are always trying to figure out the science behind getting potential donors to become donors. Two ways to achieve this is to make the transaction as simple as possible and have a major event be the focus of your campaign. The people that organized donations for Haiti did an outstanding job. It is unfortunate that a severe earthquake hit Haiti and had such a devastating impact on the already poor country; however the text message donation campaign has been a huge success.

The Red Cross joined forces with cell phone companies to create a super easy way for people to donate money. Cell phone users can text HAITI to 90999 and donate $10 to the Red Cross. The charge will be added to the cell phone user’s monthly bill. As of January 14th $5 million dollars had been donated to the Red Cross through this campaign. On January 15th that number rose to $10 million. And USATODAY reported that as of Wednesday that number has climbed to $25 million. Just to put that number in perspective the Red Cross raised $250,000 during the 2008 Hurricane season using the same text messaging model.

This $25 million does not include the other seven organizations (International Rescue Committee, Salvation Army in Canada, Yele, Catholic Relief Services, The United Way, The United Nations Foundation and Compassion International) that have their own text message campaigns. All of these campaigns are accepting donations of $5 to $10. That means that millions of people are making small donations and those donations are adding up.

The success of these texting campaigns has been influenced by celebrity support. First lady, Michelle Obama has supported the Red Cross campaign (you can check out her YouTube video here) and the ads for texting donations that aired during the NFL playoff games raised $500,000 per hour.

I do not think that anyone expected texted donations to skyrocket as they have. The number of text messages sent annually continues to increase, and buy texting your donation you don’t have to sign up for an account or fill in your credit card information. It makes sense that these campaigns have been so successful, even if the degree of the success is astounding.

What can we learn from this campaign? We learn that people’s behavior is often times hard to predict and you should continue to try different ways of engaging your members and soliciting donations from potential members. If asking for donations on Twitter does not produce the returns you are looking for, continue to try other channels. And even if you find a successful channel (i.e. direct mail campaigns) track your success rates and test different tweaks, you never know what is going to raise the most money.