Contents
The Offer
- T-Mobile is donating $10 (up to a $1 million maximum) to Red Cross Hurricane Relief when you text RALLY To 90999
Our Verdict
Donating to a good cause is always a good thing and this doesn’t cost you anything. I will say the $1 million cap and this sort of donation can rub people the wrong way and I’m not sure I love how this particular one is structured but better than not donating anything.
You presumably don’t have to be a T-Mobile customer, but I can’t be sure, because my phone is on Consumer Cellular, which uses both AT&T & T-Mobile.
I just sent the above text from my Consumer Cellular phone, and within 10 minutes I got a confirmation back that said:
“Confirmed! T-Mobile has donated $10 to Red Cross disaster relied thanks to you!” plus another sentence about how to make more donations yourself.
Worked for me on Google Fi, which uses T-Mobile
I have T-Mobile. I sent a text yesterday, and no response?
Why Red Cross? Red Cross has a whopping overhead cost of 30%, very inefficient in hurricane relief as shown in the past hurricane reliefs by ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/red-cross-ceo-has-been-misleading-about-donations
I would rather send some money to people who need it than zero dollars.
And how do you know that you sent money to people who need it?
There are other ways to help more directly than sending money to an organization with extremely high overhead. Like going to Costco/Walmart and getting a bunch of requested items and taking them to a local drop point that was mobilized to send supplies to staging points for distribution to the people who need it.
Better yet, I got my kids involved and they helped and learned a great lesson.
If you don’t have the time to do that, spend a few minutes and do some research online to find better relief efforts to donate to with much less overhead and waste.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Opening this page and texting the number takes a max of like 2 minutes, and even if 80% of that $10 goes to waste, you only spent 2 minutes donating $2.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes
the red cross has massive overhead cost, but has a great brand
Thank you for sharing this and being honest! I am glad to let you and TMobile know that I support them in contributing to Hurricane Relief!
It’s a way to engage users and make them think they’re helping when TMobile was making this donation anyway (and probably at least partially through providing equipment etc. instead of donating money).
No offence but how is this beneficial for us and a front page on DoC? I don’t really donate money to any non-profit organizations and prefer to leave it up to the billionaires to do that for us. 😮
No one is asking you to donate. T-mobile is the one donating
Brings good karma duh
You aren’t donating. Tmobile donates $10 per unique text. It doesn’t benefit you, but it is also piss low effort to help out someone that needs it.
You can’t take 8 seconds to open your messages app and send 5 letters?
Can’t tell if you’re really this obtuse. Because some people like to give to others that need it? Not everything has to be about you. Do you only ever do good things for others if you get something out of it? Just ignore the post if you don’t like it.