Mobile Commons enables 501(c)3 organizations to collect charitable contributions via text message. The donations show up as charges on the users’ phone bills. In order to make this happen, we work with the Mobile Giving Foundation, an organization whose mission is to enable charitable giving across mobile carriers.

The Mobile Giving Foundation publishes an API that application providers such as Mobile Commons use to initiate donations and collect reporting data. We wrote a Ruby library to use with their API and we are pleased to share our code with other members of the non-profit technology community. This code is released with an MIT license and is available on GitHub at http://github.com/mcommons/mgf4r