Digital Fundraising Booms For Haiti Relief

It seems that a recent digital fundraising drive for Haiti relief has stunned organizers at the Red Cross and White House. As of the last tally on Friday the campaign was at well over $8 million. "Earlier Thursday, when the Red Cross topped $3 million in text and social media donations — it hit nearly $40 million from all sources by late Thursday — spokesman Jonathan Aiken described it as 'a phenomenal number that's never been achieved before. People text up to three times at 10 bucks a pop,' Aiken said. 'You're talking about roughly 300,000 people actually spontaneously deciding, "I can spare $10 for this." And that's remarkable.' As of late Thursday, more than half of all donations to the Red Cross's Haiti relief effort had been received online, according to a news release.

Comments

Re:well done, humans.

[david.given]

$40 million dollars is a lot of money, and will do a great deal of good in Haiti. It's great that people are willing to donate to help people --- goodness knows they need it, and we can all spare it.

But to put matters into perspective, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is spending that amount every three and a half hours (based on the Congressional Research Service figure of $2 billion a week, which comes out to about $12 million an hour).