International disaster relief agencies continue working to help the victims of the catastrophic typhoon that hit the Philippines on Friday, and many people are looking to make donations. I’d like to take a moment to highlight the Denver software company that’s working behind the scenes to make sure those donations are getting to the right people.
Mobile Accord is a company I wrote about last week. It had just raised $6.6 million and launched a new product named GeoPoll that uses text messages to conduct surveys in the developing world.
I talked with Mobile Accord president Steve Gutterman for about an hour, and much of our conversation kept coming back to a different Mobile Accord product, known as mGive.
mGive is the payment-processing platform many nonprofits use to collect donations made on mobile phones. The technology, if not necessarily the company itself, gained prominence after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, as agencies like the Red Cross used mGive to raise money through text messages.
Tools like mGive have become an important tool for nonprofits, and they’ve raised about $72 million using the product. Mobile Accord processes about 85 percent of all text donations made in the U.S.
The agencies are again using mGive to raise money. Names on the list Gutterman sent me include Operation USA, the United Nations Foundation, and the World Food Program. A longer list of nonprofits and ways to donate can be found on the mGive Foundation’s website.
