Charity’s Text Campaign Draws Complaint

An innovative text-messaging campaign has run afoul of one of the large cellphone carriers.

After January’s deadly earthquake in Haiti, Catholic Relief Services started what it called a text-to-call program, which allowed donors to send a text message to connect to the Baltimore group’s call center.

The charity’s thinking was that donors who make a gift over the telephone tend to make much larger donations than the $5 or $10 contributions that typical text-to-give campaigns allow supporters to make. After the disaster in Haiti, more than 4,900 people were connected to the call center via an initial text message.

Jed Alpert, co-founder of Mobile Commons—a New York company that worked with Catholic Relief Services to set up the campaign—said that several days after the text-to-call program started, his company was notified through an intermediary that Sprint Nextel was threatening to block the charity’s text code to its customers.

In March, Sprint seemed to relent. A Sprint spokeswoman told The New York Times the company did not intend to block the code associated with the charity’s program. However, Mr. Alpert said that neither his company nor Catholic Relief Services has received any direct communication from Sprint about its concerns or if the company plans to block the campaign.

In 2007, Verizon Wireless restricted a text-message advocacy campaign by Naral Pro-Choice America, a decision that it later reversed after the move drew controversy.

After that incident, a coalition of advocacy groups asked the Federal Communications Commission to clarify whether telecommunications companies can control text messages on their networks, something they are prohibited from doing with telephone calls.