US Red Cross phone campaign nets 8 million dollars for Haiti

WASHINGTON — A mobile phone campaign set up by the US Red Cross to raise money for victims of the cataclysmic earthquake in Haiti has raised more than eight million dollars, officials said Friday.

The White House said that by early Friday morning, American donors had responded to the Haiti crisis by donating more than eight million dollars, 10 dollars at a time, by texting the word HAITI to 90999, a special cellphone number set up by the American Red Cross with help from the State Department.

A spokeswoman for the US Red Cross, Abi Weaver, said the mobile giving campaign passed the seven-million-dollar mark at 11 pm on Thursday, two days after the powerful quake struck the impoverished Caribbean island state.

"As far as we know, this has broken all global mobile marketing campaigns in history. The money is coming in at a rate of 100,000 dollars an hour," Weaver told AFP.