Mobile donations come to Alaska: text and give.

• Author: Miller, Ken
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: PHILANTHROPY OP-ED

Mobile donating, giving money to a nonprofit via text message, is incredibly quick and easy--but for many years it was unavailable in Alaska. Today you can simply text a keyword such as "BEANS" to a short code number like "50555" to donate, for example to Bean's Cafe, an Anchorage nonprofit that feeds the needy. When you text to "BEANS," a set amount of $10 is charged to your phone bill. Your cartier, such as AT&T Alaska, GCI or Alaska Communications then delivers the funds to a company, which then forwards the donation to the charity.

The mobile donation approach has been around for a few years, but really did not catch on until the earthquake in Haiti. The American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund raised more than $32 million within a month after the disaster. With successes such as Haiti and other disasters that raised millions for large national nonprofits, many Alaska nonprofits began looking at text donating as a method to increase revenue and especially reach the younger demographic that is so comfortable with texting and smartphones.

In the summer of 2010--Bean's Cafe and The Children's Lunchbox--two Anchorage-based nonprofits, began looking at mobile giving and within three months had text donating with AT&T Alaska, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile--national carriers with the technical infrastructure to implement, capture and forward the donations.

By early 2011, Alaska's two largest local carriers, GCI and Alaska...