Ring-a-ding zip — Red Kettles go cashless
Local Salvation Army donation program takes credit cards for the first time
Jim Clark / Gresham Outlook
Salvation Army employee Shirley Collison greets customers at the Gresham Fred Meyer store. The Salvation Army is now wired in to take credit and debit cards. Collison has worked for the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle program at the Gresham Fred Meyer location for seven years.
Cashless society, meet the cashless Red Kettle donation.
No need for a rattle of coins this holiday season. Just swipe your debit/credit card and stuff the receipt into the familiar kettle. Your donation is electronically sent to the Salvation Army’s annual fundraising program.
It’s all part of the charitable group’s effort to jump into the electronic donation world with both feet.
Salvation Army Red Kettle volunteers began using the card-swipe donation machines Thursday morning at the Gresham Fred Meyer store, 2497 N.E. Burnside Road. Two other cashless donation machines will be available beginning Friday morning at the Macy’s store in Tigard’s Washington Square, in the upper level, and at the upper level doors at Macy’s Lloyd Center store in Portland.
Another machine begins taking donations Friday, Nov. 27, outside the main doors of the downtown Portland Nordstrom store.
“This is cool,” said Maj. James Sullivan, who has been ringing the bell and working on the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle program for about 31 years. “This is tax deductible, so if people want to give $500 they can do it. It’s pretty slick.”
A familiar holiday soundtrack
The Salvation Army’s Portland Metro Department will have about 140 Red Kettle donation sites across the region this holiday season. The division makes about 5 percent of its donation budget during the six weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas, when busy shoppers are shuffling in and out of stores to the familiar ring-a-ding-a-ling soundtrack of volunteer bell ringers.
The Red Kettle program has been a staple of the holiday season since it was introduced on the West Coast in 1891 to provide Christmas dinner for San Francisco’s poor. Salvation Army Capt. Joseph McFee placed a large “Simpson’s pot” on a stage coach landing in the city and people tossed donations into the pot.
An Elavon Verifone credit card swipe machine will be used by the Salvation Army for cashless donations at four sites around the Portland area. The machines went into action Thursday morning in Gresham. JONATHAN HOUSE/PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP
It grew in popularity and was exported to Boston in 1895 by traveling Salvation Army officers.
Since then, the program has grown to thousands of Red Kettles and tens of thousands of volunteers every year across the nation. Money raised by the kettle donations funds Salvation Army social programs.
Cashless donation sites are new this year in Portland. A pilot program last year in Dallas, Texas, Los Angeles and Colorado Springs, Colo., showed some success with the machines, and the Salvation Army’s local divisions have been given the green light to try them in other places.
Jaime Joswick, Salvation Army national spokeswoman in Alexandria, Va., said the program showed promise in those cities last year when it helped bump up the amount of individual donations.
“In Dallas, they were seeing average donations of about $14 for the cashless machines, compared to the traditional Red Kettle where they were seeing only $1 or $2 donations,” Joswick said. “It’s a lot higher.”
After last year’s experiment, Salvation Army organizations in about 200 cities across the nation began using some form of cashless debit/credit card donation system, she said. Most of those are in the West. Other cities like Chicago, Detroit, Manhattan and Phoenix also are using the systems this holiday season, Joswick said.
Going electronic for donations is nothing new to the national charitable organization. The Salvation Army Web site, www.salvationarmyusa.org, has had an online Red Kettle donation program for several years. This year, however, the program lets people set up individual online kettles to compete for donations.
A handful of Salvation Army officers and volunteers training on the machines this week in Northeast Portland were anxious to put the cashless donation plan to work.
“We can put up signs saying that we now take Visa and Mastercard. That will be very cool,” said P. Constance Grecco, community relations director for the Salvation Army’s Portland Metro Department.
Hard to lift all those coins
The brick-sized Elavon Verifone card-swipe machines, which look like TV remote controls on steroids, are on loan from U S Bank in Portland, which also is not charging a fee for their use. The machines only take Visa or Mastercard credit and debit cards (Visa and Mastercard did not waive their card transaction fee for the charitable donations).
Salvation Army Lt. Ray Dihle checks out a credit card swipe machine that will be used this holiday season by Red Kettle volunteers to take cashless donations. Four of the machines will be used in the Portland area. JONATHAN HOUSE/PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP
People can swipe their debit/credit card on the side of the machine, a volunteer enters the last four digits of the card’s number and out rolls a two-part receipt. Donors must sign one of the receipts, just like any debit/credit transaction, and then they push the signed receipt into the waiting red kettle.
“I’m one of those guys who never carry cash, like a lot of people these days,” Sullivan said. “This is perfect for that.”
Electronic information about the cards is sent immediately to the bank and the machines don’t store any data, making them worthless to potential identity thieves.
Volunteers will use the machines for six to eight hours a day, the lifespan of their battery charge. Volunteers who handle the donations also are checked out by the Salvation Army to make sure the credit/debit card information is safe.
Many of the people training on the devices have been part of the Red Kettle operation for more than a decade. Besides Sullivan, volunteer and paid part-time Salvation Army employee Bryan Loucks has been a bell ringer and Red Kettle volunteer manager for 18 years. Lt. Ray Dihle has manned a kettle for about six years. Three years ago in California, Dihle was counting the change in one of his kettles when he unfolded a donated check for $7,777.77.
Depending on who’s ringing the bells, Red Kettle donations can include a lot of dollar bills or a pile of change. If Boy Scout troops are volunteering, their young friends usually fill the kettles with coins, said Maj. Jim Sloan, another longtime veteran of the Red Kettle program.
“Sometimes it will be so filled with change that it’s hard to lift,” Sloan said. “I’ve had kids come up to kettles with bottles of coins and want to donate that. It takes quite awhile to dump all that in a kettle.”
kevinharden@portlandtribune.com