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Carriers Delay Paying Japan's Texting Donations
Julie188 writes "As the fallout from the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown tragedy continues to unfold, Americans want to help. We learned from the Haiti disaster that the easiest thing to do is to text a donation to our favorite relief organization. But, unlike Haiti, Japan's text-to-give donations will take as long as three months to get to the relief agency. And the company handling these donations, mGive.com, has not waived the transaction fees it charges relief agencies."
I wish there would be greater disclosure about this and many other things. It can take up to 3 months for the US, but some other countries such as Latin America and Asian countries not called China and Japan it can take up to 6 months. In the EU, some people don't have to pay their bill monthly, there are quarterly and bi-annual billing cycles. It's a shame, because if there was full disclosure many people would have donated via another method. Hopefully all this exposure will get them to declare this a "crisis" and get the funds moving immediately.
P.S. Please be careful when giving your child a cell phone, it's as easy to buy virtual goods with it as a credit card and companies like mine have no way of knowing that you have given it to your child. If you would like to block these types of purchases, contact your local wireless company and have them remove "Premium SMS" from your child's phone. I wish all wireless carriers were forced to disclose this whenever anyone purchases a "Family Plan".
The day the Tsunami hit I scampered out the door to give a pint of blood. Later that day I thought of putting a item on an eBay auction to raise some fundage for American Red Cross. Ebay listing page allowed me to pick a charity and a percentage to go there. Wonderful. The listing was published and had a big banner about the Red Cross added to it.
After the auction ended the trouble began. The buyer paid and I found the money sitting in my PayPal account, with their customary cut removed from it. WTF?!? I drop a note to PayPal that this must be some sort of error, the money should have gone straight to American Red Cross. No reply, typical.
Then I get on the online support with someone and tell them about it and ask them to send the answer to my email (the one I provided) and again I get nothing. Bother.
Finally over the weekend I spend 2.5 hours waiting through the queue for help by apparently the only on-line customer support person they had working (this smells like the business model: we have few complaints to our customer support so satisfaction must be nearly 100%, but I digress) It is finally explained to me that I had to set up a Mission Fish account first so the payment would have been routed to them. Excuse me? You let me list an item where 100% was to go to a registered charity, but didn't establish a precondition of publishing the listing that the Mission Fish account be set up first, while the charity logo and mission are splashed all over a listing - yet the payment for it can completely bypass the charity? Hello, this looks like enabling Donor Fraud.
I finally have had enough of their stupidity and go over to American Red Cross website and donate directly, including the sum I received for the auctioned item. I'm beside myself with the stupidity of corporations, but with eBay this is nothing new. Since 1999 they've gone from good to bad to worse.
Be wary of donating via eBay. No guarantee the funds you pay do go where you think.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
> Whoever he is, he's probably sitting on a beach somewhere safe, sipping a Mai Tai right now.
Where is a Tsunami when you need one ;-) ?
The Red Cross sold coffee and donuts instead of giving them away to military personnel during World War II.
This unfortunate policy came into being because service agencies in Britain helping British military personnel were less well-financed than the American Red Cross. Thus, these agencies were forced to charge British military members for the same items that American service members were getting free from the American Red Cross.
To avoid further embarrassment to the British, who were playing host to thousands of U.S. troops, the U.S. Secretary of War requested that the American Red Cross begin charging American service members for such items as coffee and donuts in its canteens. The Red Cross interpreted this request as a wartime demand and complied so that it could continue aiding U.S. troops. However, the Red Cross sold items at or below cost and never profited a penny from these sales.
Since the end of World War II, the American Red Cross has not charged military personnel -- not in the Korean, Vietnam, or Persian Gulf conflicts, for example.
-- http://www.redcross.org
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Charity Navigator or something similar. Reward efficiency (i.e. high % of dollar goes to actual cause). Sometimes though if you're trying to support a certain cause, it's hard to find a charity that ranks high.
Really quickly I see:
AmeriCares
International Relief Teams
Direct Relief International
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
90 days was quick in the days of the Pony Express.
In the days of 500ms ping times around the world, 90 days in incredibly slow. I understand that the money is not there until you pay your wireless bill, but that is 45 days or less, so anything over 50 days is very slow.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Exactly.
People are also suffering from massive ignorance about how things work here too. Firstly, texting DOES NOT donate money. Period. End of discussion. Texting actually PLEDGES to donate. Your carrier will never release uncollected funds based on a pledge, to which they legally could hope to recover transaction fees (which is far less than the pledge).
So, once you pledge, via texting, that's all you've done. You've not actually donated any money. When you pay your billing, at the end of the billing cycle in which you pledged money, you actually have the option to fulfill your pledge. After the money is collected, your carrier will likely pay their collections at the end of their billing cycle. So right there, you're very reasonably out 30-60-days out.
Once your carrier releases their funds, you're now looking at roughly another thirty days before that party actually gets organized, commits, and releases the funds to the cause.
Also, what appears to be part of the confusion is traditionally, when you donate to a cause, you are not actually donating to a cause. Traditionally, you are donating to an organization in the name of a cause; whereby, the organization is free to do what it likes with the money it receives. So long as they donate something to the cause, they have fulfilled their legal obligation. This is true even with major non-profits like Red Cross.
What also seems like a likely source of confusion is non-profit does not mean what most people believe it means. For whatever reason people tend to associate non-profit as being the preferred form of company for these types of things because all of their money goes toward the underlying cause. Realistically, nothing could be father from the truth. A non-profit only requires their profits to be re-invested into the corporation. That doesn't mean employees work cheaply or even for fair market prices. That doesn't mean executives are not paid huge salaries and receive massive bonuses and benefits. In fact, many non-profits donate exceptionally little to their causes, frequently as little as 10%-20% of their income. IIRC, with Red Cross, as much as 60-70% (I'm pretty fuzzy on that number but the point is, a good chunk does help others) of what is donated actually helps people outside of the Red Cross organization.
Really this article should be called, "Damn you Net-30!"
Boo.