It’s hard to take your eyes off the scenes of devastation in Haiti, or to focus on anything beyond the truly horrific suffering: On Monday it was estimated that the death toll might reach as high as 200,000, and that three-quarters of the capital city Port-au-Prince was in need of reconstruction. Shattered infrastructure and the lack of a strong government presence are exacerbating the problems by making it difficult to get rescue teams to those who might still be alive, and needed supplies to the survivors.

But in one way, Haiti has been fortunate: When it comes to financial support, new media—and specifically mobile–have stepped up to provide swift, frictionless new ways for ordinary people to contribute cash to the recovery efforts, deploying channels resources that were not readily available even a few years ago.

The American Red Cross reported on Monday that it has received $22 million in donations via text message. Users simply text “Haiti” to short code 90999, and a $10 donation to the group’s Haitian relief fund is added to the customer’s next mobile phone bill.

That $22 million amounts to about one fifth of the $112 million the American has raised in total—mostly from more conventional check-writing and corporate donations.

And an ongoing fund set up by ex-Fugee singer Wyclef Jean, who is Haitian, has been collecting mobile donations to his Yele Haiti Foundation from users who text “YELE” to 501501.

The Red Cross charitable effort and others for groups such as the Clinton Foundation, the International Medical Corps and the International Rescue Committee are being coordinated through the Mobile Giving Foundation, which is coordinating mobile money-raising with the four major U.S. carriers, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

For one thing, that means getting the carriers to waive their messaging fees for those donation texts. This ain’t “American Idol”; no one’s making money off this SMS traffic.

But more importantly, since financial support is needed right now, the carriers have also agreed to change their standard donor procedures and forward the money before they get it. In the past, text donations have been sent on after users pay their monthly phone bill.

But Haiti’s problems can’t wait for the end of the month, and Verizon, for one, reports that it has already transferred $3 million in text pledges to the American Red Cross. All the carriers say they have also made direct donations to Haitian relief.

The mobile mechanism is important because it does an end-run around something online marketers are all too familiar with: customer freeze-up when confronted with a credit-card submission form. Faced with the need to input their credit card number—including, more often than not these days, a security code—and hedged about with explanations of SSL security and other protective measures, a good proportions of people fall off the transaction train and fail to complete the form.

As Mashable founder and CEO Peter Cashmore put it in a column on CNN.com , “Hitting a button to blast out a message to your friends is easy, but when faced with a credit card payment form, many Web users shy away.”

In these days when so many of us use mobile to check our Twitter feeds obsessively or keep our Facebook friends informed about what we had for lunch or watched on TV last night, it would be a disgrace not to use those same communication tools to supply financial help in such a dire time.

Thank goodness, it seems we are rising to the occasion.

Mobile donations aren’t the whole solution to the charitable needs of non-profits at a time like this. For one thing, most carriers impose a fairly small limit on the amount that can be contribution via text message. Right now the ceiling at AT&T, for example, is five $5 donations and three $10 donations a month for a grand total of $55. And if you’ve charged other premium content such as ringtones or music to your AT&T bill, the total gets cut off at $100. The carriers don’t want to delve too deep into the business of collecting for things other people sell—even if it’s philanthropy.

That could change if this Haitian experience proves that mobile can be a valuable and trouble-free funnel for grass-roots funding. But right now, if you’re looking to give more than a few $10 gifts, you’re probably better off going directly to the Web sites of the non-profits you want to support.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note how far we’ve come in just the last few years in putting these glitzy and too-often trivial new media tools toward offering real help to human beings in trouble. Six years ago, the world got its first and most harrowing glimpses of the destructive tsunami that stuck Indonesia from online video reports. Last June, during the riots that followed the unfair Iranian elections, we all marveled that new media such as Twitter and Facebook were not only reporting the important event but actually carrying support back to the protesters—letting them know that the outside world was paying heed to their protest.

Swift first alerts and giving a voice to those who can’t speak in their own country: Those things are important. But letting ordinary people play an important part in getting actual food, water, shelter and medical attention to the suffering—that’s starting to feel like the mobile channel is living up to its promise and justifying all the silly things we’ve asked it to do.