It takes Simona Luczyová, a skilled text-messager, all of 20 seconds to donate money to charity — thanks to her mobile phone.

Since last year, she's been making contributions to Kapka naděje, which provides support to children with leukemia, through its Donor Message System, or DMS, which deducts money from people's mobile phones.

"DMS is a great way for lazy people like me to make donations," she says.

Donations using mobile phones have taken off in the Czech Republic during the past year and have changed the way people are contributing to charities.

Donors Forum, which created DMS in 2004, received 3.3 million donor text messages in 2005, raising almost 90 million Kč ($3.9 million) that year. This year, donors have sent more than 1.2 million messages.

DMS has become the primary way to make donations for 93 percent of Czechs, says Veronika Brůhová, Donors Forum spokeswoman.

More than 90 charities are using DMS to raise money.

Immediately after the first reports of the 2006 floods, the charity People In Need (PIN) and four other organizations set up new DMS codes in order to raise money for flood relief. As of April 11, people had sent more than 1.9 million Kč in donations through their mobile phones, about 70 percent of the total money PIN had raised for victims.

Czech invention

Although there were similar products prior to DMS, such as the Premium Rate SMS or ad-hoc charitable SMS projects organized individually by mobile operators, DMS is a uniquely Czech invention.

Brůhová says other countries have already expressed interest to adopt Donors Forum's DMS technology for their markets. "We are in talks with the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Germany and Slovakia already," she says.

The advantage of the DMS is that it is open to any charity and that all three major Czech mobile operators have agreed to cooperate using one agreed-upon number. The application is built on a simple platform and individual fundraising collections can be set up within minutes of a charity requesting one.

The way it works is simple: People send a text message with the name or code of a particular charitable project in the body — for example, "DMS POVODNE2006," People In Need's code for flood relief — to the number 87777. They then receive a text message in return confirming the donation, which is a flat fee of 30 Kč billed to the phone.

Twenty-seven crowns of that goes to the charity, with the balance going to cover operator costs.

People can send as many donation messages as they want.

Media help

Petra Černá, spokesperson for the charity Centrum Paraple, says media coverage has had a tremendous affect on how much people donate.

"After Czech TV mentioned our DMS project, we got over 1 million Kč worth of DMS donations within hours," she says. The charity has used such donations to pay for projects aimed at helping to integrate paraplegics back into society through therapy, special sporting equipment and computer labs.

Brůhová says that television has a tremendous impact on DMS fundraising. On Jan. 5, 2005, Donor Forum raised almost 6 million Kč through DMS for Southeast Asia tsunami victims, she says, largely thanks to the media coverage surrounding that tragedy.

"Most DMS messages came between 7 and 8 p.m., when people were watching the evening news," she says.

Local vs. global causes

While DMS might be making it easier for Czechs to give, it is no guarantee that they will, and some charities say that given the number of natural disasters that took place in the past year — the tsunamis, Hurricane Katrina, the massive earthquake in Pakistan — some people are overwhelmed.

"People are starting to get immune to giving," says Jakub Martásek of the charity ADRA. "There have been too many major catastrophes lately."

So, when a catastrophe strikes close to home, as the recent floods have, the response might not be that robust, DMS or no DMS.

ADRA set up its DMS flood code April 4 and had received 900 donations by April 6. Martásek calls that a lukewarm response.

Brůhová says that global disasters generate the highest response.

ADRA received more than 1.6 million messages donated to the tsunamis in Southeast Asia, the highest number of DMS ever sent as a response to a single disaster.

"Domestic affairs are usually less tragic and smaller in scope" than global ones, Martásek says.