The complete devastation of our neighbor to the south—literally our neighbor with the coast of Haiti closer to the United States than Milwaukee is to New York City—after a 7.0 magnitude quake left over 3 million people in need of medical attention, food, and shelter.

Stories of extreme poverty and the heartbreaking need for resources is being answered again and again by what we see as a light in the darkness of this horrible tragedy—technology.

Turn on any TV or radio station and you will find pleas for donations. There have been many tragedies in the last decade, but what makes this tragedy different is you now have millions of people able to donate by doing something they probably do every day: send text messages.

Text message donations alone have raised over $22 million. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are all working with the Mobile Giving Foundation to better route donations to the Red Cross.

And as this article states,

The $22 million total smashed the previous American Red Cross record for text-based donations, which was the $400,000 raised in 2005 for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

The effort illustrates popularity of text messaging and current mobile penetration in the US. According to CTIA, there are 276.6 million wireless subscribers sending 135.2 billion text messages a month as of June 2009.

Our hearts go out to all the families affected by the Haitian Earthquake Disaster. As a technology issue nonprofit, we are grateful to all the people who have taken full advantage of the technology in their pockets to make a difference.

Please consider donating.

Text the word “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 On behalf of the American Red Cross in the U.S.