As of early today, the Red Cross said it had raised $8 million in $10 donations via text messages, and that it could raise millions more via that route over the long holiday weekend.

The simple donation process requires a mobile phone user with a texting account to text the word "Haiti" to 90999. A $10 donation will be automatically applied to their phone bill. to forward 100% of the total generated in the program to the American Red Cross.

"We honestly have no clue how much more to expect, but have been really surprised and overwhelmed by the amount of donations via texting," said Red Cross spokeswoman Carrie Housman in an interview today. The $8 million total raised by early Friday, less than three days after the earthquake ravaged Haiti, was "unheard of," she said. Half the total was raised in less than a day, she added.

"We never raised this much money with a mobile campaign, especially $10 at a time," Housman said, noting that smaller domestic mobile campaigns have been tried since 2008. The latest mobile fund-raising campaign, she said, "blows [those] results out of the water."

She attributed the latest response to the dire emergency, the closeness of Haiti to the U.S. and also the simplicity of donating via text.