Charity Gets Chance to Raise More Money Through Free Times Square Ad

Starting tomorrow, if you happen to be in the center of New York City’s Times Square, you may catch a glimpse of a 30-second public-service announcement about homelessness and hunger by the charity St. John’s Bread and Life.

You’ll also be prompted to donate $10 via text message by entering the word “Bread” and 27138 to send.

The Brooklyn, N.Y., charity runs a soup kitchen and food pantry to feed 2,200 people a day. It received a surprising gift from one of its board members in June: the chance to tell its story on the Sony JumboTron in Times Square. At no cost.

The board member wishes to be anonymous, says Anthony Butler, executive director of St. John’s Bread and Life. “He’s a big supporter of ours, a very wealthy benefactor. He’s very active in this. It was his idea.”

The auction prize, valued at $10,000 to $15,000, was won through a spring gala in May from the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service in East Harlem, N.Y.

The video will run twice per hour, 24 hours a day, for the entire month of October. St. John’s University Division of Institutional Advancement produced the video for Bread and Life as a donation.

The Times Square opportunity also gave the impetus for the charity to start seeking text donations. It signed a monthly contract with MobileCause for $149 a month (MobileCause gets 4.9 percent of each donation) to run the solicitation effort.

“This was something I had been thinking about for a while,” Mr. Butler says. He hopes to cover the cost of the text-to-donate program and raise at least $15,000 more via people donating through their cell phones because they saw the appeal at 42nd and Broadway.

With more Americans going into poverty, the organization has seen increasing demands of 12 percent at its mobile soup kitchen and 85 percent at its food pantry this year. The number of visits is expected to rise to 31,000 this year from 23,000 last year.

You can watch the 30-second video at: http://www.stjohns.edu/alumni/thankyou/breadlife.stj.