The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) has announced that the East Africa Crisis Appeal has raised the highest amount of any of its campaigns through text donations, without taking away from other donation channels.

More than £1.5m has been raised through SMS texting, including gift aid raised from more than 70 per cent of those donors. The previous highest text donation total was £230,000 for the Haiti Earthquake Appeal in 2010.

The DEC believes this is the highest amount raised through text donations for a single charitable cause. Earlier this year Red Nose Day raised £15m via SMS donations for a variety of causes.

DEC chief executive Brendan Gormley said: “We believe text-to-give is helping us reach a new generation of donors and the feedback we have received from those donors via social media has been excellent.”

This campaign was also the first to use texting to give messages on TV appeals shown on ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky.

So far the overall total for the East Africa appeal stands at £72m with online donations being the largest single donation channel at 34.5 per cent followed by post at 26 per cent. Text donations represent 3.3 per cent of overall donations compared to 0.3 per cent for the Haiti appeal.