Though only a couple of years old, text-message donations have become increasingly popular amongst charities looking to expand their outreach.

Musician Alicia Keys, co-founder of Keep a Child Alive, urged concert-goers to text ‘ALIVE’ to 90999, thereby making an easy $5 donation to fight the African AIDS pandemic. More than 8,000 fans helped Keys raise over $40,000 for the cause.

“For many people, this was their first encounter with mobile giving, and it came through Keep A Child Alive, which has always been a cutting-edge, progressive organization,” Leigh Blake, co-founder and president of Keep A Child Alive, told Newswire. “I’m convinced that the ease of mobile giving helped us receive many contributions we might not have gotten otherwise.”

The Mobile Giving Foundation (MGF), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that enables mobile donations, reports that it helped 150 nonprofits raise over $400,000 using the $5 price point in 2008. The MGF expects more than $1 million to be raised monthly by the end of 2009.

“The gift is charged on their wireless operator’s bill as a non taxable donation,” Jim Manis, founder of MGF, explained on Nextgov.com. “The wireless operator collects the donation as part of their normal billing cycle and remits 100 percent of the donation to the Mobile Giving Foundation. We collect the donations from all the wireless operators, reconcile with our reporting and remit to the recipient foundation.”

Amnesty International, UNICEF, and the American Red Cross are among some of the more high-profile causes that now utilize mobile donations.

And now the Obama administration, which has been known for its innovative use of technology, will be using a similar strategy to help raise money for humanitarian aid in Pakistan.

Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. Department of State would be raising $110 million in humanitarian aid for the displaced residents of Pakistan’s Swat Valley, a region that was recently overtaken by the Taliban. These funds would come in the form of donations on top of the $60 million the U.S. has been giving to Pakistan since last August.

Clinton said the State Department would acquire these funds via text messaging: People interested in donating to the Pakistani relief program could text ‘SWAT’ to 20222 to make a $5 donation to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where the money will be used to buy tents, clothing, food and medicine for the displaced Pakistanis.

Already, the State Department is reporting that it has raised $135,008 as of June 1 from US sources. Of this total, $31,390 was procured through 5,722 text messages. $84,702 of the remainder was raised through 439 online donations, and the remaining $18,916 was raised by mail and from major donors.

Clinton said that the money being raised will go “primarily to international assistance efforts the United States is deeply involved in supporting.” She added that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is also involved in the relief efforts and “has delivered 30,000 family relief kits, 5,000 tents, FM radios, and generators to provide both light and water.”

Clinton also said that text messaging would be used to inform local Pakistani communities about ongoing relief efforts, as well as helping families in the region keep in touch.

“We have been hard at work in this area for a number of weeks, looking for ways that we can get communications directly to people on the ground,” Clinton said at a press conference last month. “And we know that a lot of the Pakistanis who are being displaced by the conflict have cell phones. So we’re going to try to reach directly to them, not only to give them information that will be of assistance to them, but also to provide a way of connecting them up with other people, with the military, with the governing authorities.”

“Providing this assistance is not only the right thing to do, but we believe that it is essential to global security and the security of the United States, and we are prepared to do more as the situation demands,” she said.

Text message donations are the latest in a series of technological innovations that the Obama administration has been utilizing to mobilize support on the ground: Obama’s Vice Presidential choice was announced via text message, so that his biggest fans knew Joe Biden was the pick before even the press. President Obama’s Facebook page currently has over 6 million supporters, and this page is used to keep fans updated on the goings-on of the White House. And most recently, Obama joined thousands of supporters on a conference call to organize for healthcare reform.

But like every new technological innovation, the new utilization of text messages by the State Department to gather donations has brought on some level of skepticism.

Gautham Nagech, staff correspondent for Nextgov.com, said that the use of text messaging for public outreach is a “logical choice,” but “the proposal as outlined [by Clinton] inspires a number of questions, including how will the money be collected.”

“It’s also interesting to ask whether the government should really be asking the public to donate their own money to an international cause that is already receiving millions in taxpayer funds without explaining why the amount of federal aid is insufficient,” Gautham added. “Considering how free the government has been with its pocketbook lately, it’s hard to believe that $5 donations from taxpayers are really that necessary.”

But Manis told Nextgov that “all certified mobile giving campaigns, like this effort, comply with our standards designed to protect the consumer and establish the mobile channel as the most effective available for giving and donor interaction.”

“At the end of the day, this is a trusted and convenient way for people to make donations to their favorite causes,” Manis said.

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