Report Examines Mobile Giving

Charitable donations from mobile phones have grown more common in recent years. Two thirds of American adults now use text messaging, and 9 percent have texted charitable donations from their mobile phones. And these text donors are emerging as a new cohort of charitable givers. The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors — which analyzed the “Text to Haiti” campaign after the 2010 earthquake — finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks.