BEFORE you RT that RedCross donation message or donate any cash
yourselves... please consider.
Red Cross is a giant beast of a company. It is $600,000,000 in debt. It has ridiculous overhead.
As fellow hackers... We're all trying to build startups/ideas because we think big companies are missing something... that we have a better way to do things... that we can build a better product.
If you want to help Haiti. Give directly. I spent 2 years building a
non-profit (a start-up if you will) that sets up volunteer centers in
disaster areas. We are a super lean organization with an executive director that takes a $0 per year salary.
Donations are being gathered to directly help the people in Haiti.
I sympathize with your frustration with the American Red Cross, but please pay attention when posting financial information. The statement "It is $600,000,000 in debt" is incorrect.
The American Red Cross has $613MM in debt. But it also has $3.5BB in assets. In addition to the aforementioned debt, there are $1.2BB in additional liabilities, for total net assets of:
$1,672,466,000
Source: KPMG consolidated financial statement, June 30 2009.
Infrastructure is expensive. It also enables acting on large scales immediately. I have no problem with the idea that money donated to the Red Cross may not go "directly" to the victims of the latest tragedy. Without the money for administrative and infrastructure costs, they would be unable to do what they do.
I think your startup is both good and noble. But I suspect that being a "beast of a company" and having large infrastructure costs is the price we have to pay for an organization to be able to respond immediately to humanitarian crisis on a global scale.
I agree with some of your criticisms of the Red Cross, however given that rapid response is necessary and this is time sensitive, can you actually use the money to deploy and ramp up in a short enough time to make the donation meaningful to the current crisis?
I support your aims, but the ability to move quickly is essential and it's unclear whether your organization is likely to bring support faster or slower. Could you elaborate?
Yes. We are the size we are precisely so we can move quickly. There are lots of other organizations that are already on the ground. Organizations we've already worked with. We'll have people on the ground in the next few days. We're also a share the love kind of organization. We find the best way to do the most good... sometimes that means giving our money to other organizations... sometimes we lend our volunteers to other organizations.
MSF runs some of the only free medical centers in Haiti -- if you look at the news stories coming in about the injured, they tend to be from or near MSF facilities.
The Red Cross and UNICEF and other large charities are great, but it's definitely worth remembering that organizations like MSF have been on the ground in Haiti since before the quake.
I admit I'm naive. I don't know how efficient the Red Cross is, nor other operational issues.
They are, however, there. I gave to the Red Cross not just for Haiti, but for something else that will happen. It saddens me I donated because of Haiti, not just for Haiti.
I wish I knew more about operations such as yours. I wish I knew more about the organizations saving lives right now in Haiti. I wish I knew more about organizations and people who take on the lasting sadness after the horror.
I just don't know.
Thank you for giving me another organization I believe will be there.
Another option might be the IRC: International Rescue Committee, at http://www.theirc.org/
You can donate all of $5 in a similar manner by doing this: text 253-83 with the message 'haiti'. They'll send you more info and a confirmation request before you are billed the five bucks.
Friend of a worker there recommended it. I can't vouch for the organization and how they work, and agree with the parent post about overhead, but why not throw 5 dollars into an unknown, in a situation in a country that deserves so much better?
The fact that donations get processed on a different domain than hodr.org is a huge red flag for me. I already donated to UNICEF, but if I hadn't, I would have really thought twice before giving to HODR online.
Thanks for that feedback. I understand where you're coming from, but that's the company that processes our donations. You can check us out on the BBB site or on services like http://bit.ly/GuideStar_HODR (When we have extra $ we'll invest in our own SSL cert and payment processing. For now we'll let trusted services like Convio.com handle our donations.)
Could you please elaborate? I'm sure a lot of hackers who give to the RedCross would be interested to understand your reasons so that they can make better decisions about donating to relief funds in the future.
CEO pay means nothing. What matters is how much good they do per dollar. I'm sure the amount of money they receive each year is available somewhere, and they'll be happy to tell you what they've accomplished with it. Compare that to other organizations instead of assuming they're ineffective because they think it's worthwhile to pay their CEO well.
The magnitude of CEO pay in the private sector is similarly a non-issue, but please keep my opinion on that to yourselves, lest the pitchforks be redirected toward me.
You're right that CEO pay doesn't mean that much in the scheme of things especially if they increase the effectiveness of the organization, but it's an issue that concerns people who make a lot less and are deciding where they should donate their hard earned dollars.
Non-profits also use their allure of helping others to recruit and often pay rank and file employees less than market rate wages (see some comments in the slate article).
For example, doctors who work for these organizations could likewise be making $100's of K per year. Some doctors also work much harder than their market counterpart, performing more surgeries under difficult conditions.
Upthread, it's reported the Red Cross has $3.5 billion in assets and $1.8 billion in liabilities. Managing an institution of that size, you don't want to skimp on executive talent, or you can lose a lot more than $565K in the blink of an eye. And, the current CEO probably made a lot more when she was in the private sector (at Fidelity Investments and AT&T).
My family lived through the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, India which was of similar proportions. Based on their personal experience, the things immediately needed after an earthquake are:
1) Heavy earth moving equipment (to get people out from under the rubble)
2) Tents and blankets (it is cold)
3) Medicines
4) Food
Many organizations only focused on 2 and 4 in India. In the end, there was a glut of food, tents, clothes and blankets and not enough earth moving equipment and many people who could have been saved, died. The situation may be different in Haiti but they are an underdeveloped nation and I doubt they have as much equipment as is needed. I have already seen reports that there's a scarcity: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0...
Obviously medicine is also in short supply.
It may be a tall order to organize to get this there but at least we have someone here who has done it before. If dariusmonsef (or anyone else) can vouch for a group on the ground in Haiti who can actually manage these things well, it may be worth the effort to try to borrow these things ourselves and try to arrange for comped air transport.
I know some folks in the airline industry who I can ask about transporting the stuff for free.
Do you guys think this is doable and worth the effort?
Unless they're getting a deal on their payment processing for being a charity, I'd suggest taking the extra minute to go to their website. Credit card payments will cost them less than fifty cents of that $10. Cell phone providers charge much more.
Also, while charities love to use current events to drive fundraising appeals, their current disaster is almost universally paid for by funds they collected months ago. If you're going to give, give smart. (Relatedly, this is why sending non-monetary goods after a major disaster is perhaps less effective than you might wish it would be.)
Right.. for those curious why this makes sense for carriers. Just think how much carriers charge for txting. Anything that gets people using SMS is a win in their book.
That depends on your agreement, locality, and what provider you're doing business with, but if you're thinking 30 ~ 50% you are probably in the right ballpark.
are you certain that they aren't figuring in costs and billing you for $10+rates? while that would mean the end customer pays more, it does mean they would be getting more than a paypal donation.
Well, think that one through: if your advertisement says "Text 12345 to 45678 to donate $10 to the Red Cross", and you do so, and then your itemized cellphone bill says "Red Cross: $20", what is your reaction likely to be?
Merchants foot the bill for transaction costs to encourage transaction volume. It is the same reason I quote my prices as $29.95 not "$29.95 plus whatever your credit card costs me to process."
i've already seen a non-red cross ad for the exact same thing, except $5 for hati, and the ad specifically stated transaction and standard data rates are added on top. looking for the ad now.
I was curious about how this service works, mostly to know where the money is actually flowing. I Googled for awhile and came up with nothing, but thanks to randomwalker's post in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051844), I was able to dig up some info. I summarized what I found here:
get sites to donate a small ad block that links to a donation/ways to help haiti page. obviously fully nonprofit. list all other sites/companies involved like they did with the nomoreie6 page. thoughts?
A good alternative option for a larger web based donation is Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, they are already on the ground and operational: http://bit.ly/7anR0x
I'm curious about what short codes can carry extra charges like this. For regular phones, people are generally aware that 900 numbers are toll lines and you'll be charged for that, but for these text numbers I don't know what the rule is.
Seems like there's a lot of potential for scammers to tell people to text a certain number without telling people that charges would apply. At the student newspaper I used to work for, we told people to text "follow name" to 40404 (Twitter's short code) to get text message updates with news.
The International Federation of the Red Cross is a hypocritical organization. In Muslim countries it is called The Red Crescent (and any aid packages/vehicles are marked with a crescent moon).
Yet only one muslim country (Kuwait) figures (low down) in the accounts of top 25 donor countries for the IFRC for recent years. But 10 of the top 25 beneficiary countries are muslim. Thus the many of the donations from christian countries to an ostensibly christian emergency relief charity actually end up going to help muslims and are branded as aid from a muslim charity. (Either most of those oil-rich muslim countries aren't giving to charities, or they're only giving to charities that aid other muslims -- and it's probably the latter.)
I have no objection to people receiving aid whatever their religion (or lack of). But it disgusts me that that aid given to a "christian" charity uses the religious imagery of the donating country to raise money and ends up deceiving the recipients into believing it came from a muslim charity.
Donor and recipient end up being deceived by this duplicitous organization. Most people I've talked to about this have no idea that the IFRC is branded as the "Red Crescent" in muslim countries.
I prefer to support Médecins Sans Frontières. They seem far more honest about what they are doing.
The American Red Cross looks like it is not part of this IFRC duplicity.
But a big part of the Christian message is to give what you can to those who need it. Note that it doesn't at any point say in the Bible 'Give money only to Christians in need' and because of this the 'Donor being decieved' isn't especially important.
However, I disagree that anybody is really being decieved at all, it is readily available knowledge that the Red Cross give money under the Red Crescent branding in muslim countries.
It would also make no sese at all to brand themselves at Red Cross in muslim countries - the symbology would have no meaning to the locals at all.
has this method of collection been tried before? if not I'm guessing this is an untapped goldmine for the right entrepreneur: set up charities with simpler donation vectors.
I was more curious about the business of the middleman in this process, and I looked into it earlier today. This particular short code operator, mGive (http://www.mgive.com/) focuses on charities and was launched 2 years ago. I'm guessing this is their first big exposure.
Wikipedia has the basics of setting up a new short code: "Common short codes in the U.S. are administered by NeuStar, under a deal with Common Short Code Administration - CTIA. Short codes can be leased at the rate of $1000 a month for a selected code or $500 for a random code." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code)
It's about 2 years old. It's regulated by the Mobile Giving Foundation - http://mobilegiving.org/ The interesting thing here is that the carriers have agreed to pass your full donation amount to the charity, they don't take a cut.
I've set up a small site at http://haitibizrelief.blogspot.com/ designed to give people a fast and easy way to donate, view donations through ChipIn, and to get some exposure for their startup or business.
Given the demographics here, perhaps this might be of interest: Jimmy Jean-Louis, who plays "The Haitian" on the TV series, Heroes, is actually from Haiti (and has family affected by the quake) he runs a charity called Hollywood Unites for Haiti: http://www.hufh.org/
(I know little about the charity beyond what I read on its website but, again, thought it might be of interest to people here).
Red Cross is a giant beast of a company. It is $600,000,000 in debt. It has ridiculous overhead.
As fellow hackers... We're all trying to build startups/ideas because we think big companies are missing something... that we have a better way to do things... that we can build a better product.
If you want to help Haiti. Give directly. I spent 2 years building a non-profit (a start-up if you will) that sets up volunteer centers in disaster areas. We are a super lean organization with an executive director that takes a $0 per year salary.
Donations are being gathered to directly help the people in Haiti.
Donations Can Be Made Here: http://bit.ly/HODR_Haiti
Sorry to rant... but the RedCross-fest on Twitter right now is killing me.
EDIT: I created a new post with more info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051914