The jingling of Salvation Army bell ringers may become a ghost of holidays past.

The "army of compassion" says it is moving in the direction of replacing its red kettle-guarding ground troops - a tradition since 1891 - with "virtual kettles" on the Internet. The charity cites a Target Corp. decision to prohibit bell ringers from its stores this year as part of a trend pushing it online.

"If this is a pattern that begins to force us to remove the bell ringers from stores, it will eventually disappear and we're very concerned about that," said Maj. George Hood, national community relations secretary for the Salvation Army. "It may be that the kettle has to go electronic."

The nonprofit organization has stepped up an Internet marketing campaign for online giving, Hood said.

Signs of a pattern, he said, are a 2001 policy limiting charitable soliciting at Wal-Mart to 14 days a year, and a decision several years ago by a national mall chain to prohibit the Salvation Army from common areas. The numbers of bell ringer volunteers are also declining. Some are actually paid.

Ringing bells and filling kettles is an old-fashioned, labor-intensive method in a high-tech world, said Rick Cohen, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group.

"I would think if they're going into aggressive online campaigning that's more because of technology than because of Target," Cohen said.

Another charity, Volunteers of America, also has logged on. Its "Sidewalk Santa" campaign, with bell-ringing Santas asking for coins in their "chimneys," started in Los Angeles in 1900 and spread to other cities but now exists only in New York and online.

A national survey of fund-raisers by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University found increased success in online giving this summer, indicating more organizations are trying the strategy.

For the Salvation Army, a recent mega-donation may also be shifting the focus, Cohen said. The $1.5 billion contribution announced this year by the estate of Joan Kroc, the late widow of McDonald's mogul Ray Kroc, is a slew of zeros away from nickels in a bucket.

With $1.3 billion in private support last year, the Christian charity is the No. 1 fund-raiser in the nation, according to a ranking released this month by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The total money raised, however, has been dropping for several years.

The organization operates on a $2.5 billion budget, with 17 percent overhead, according to 2002 figures.

About 10 percent of the $94 million plopped into kettles around the country last year came from about 1,000 Target stores, Hood said.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)