We’ve all seen the advertisements: “Text WATER to 38279”, “Text FOOD to 18732”. You pull out your phone, you send a text, and VOILA! you’ve made a $5-10 donation. Its simple, quick and easy, and it requires next to no effort. Heck, you don’t even need a credit card; it just rolls up into your phone bill. What’s more, after witnessing Alicia Keys raise $450K in one night on American Idol, or reading about the Red Cross taking in $32M in response to the Haiti earthquake, we are tempted to believe that text-to-give campaigns are the answer to every nonprofit's prayers, and that 2010 really will be the year of mobile.
It’s easy to see why. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve intended to give next time I’m at my computer, but some hurdle or another impedes my donation. Enter mobile giving, which doesn’t just jump these hurdles, it destroys them.
By introducing the “now” factor, nonprofits can capture that would-be donor who always seems to forget; since the modern man always has his mobile, there is no wait time between the ask and the donation. Organizations using mobile giving campaigns will not lose donors to complicated websites, forgotten logins or credit card issues. But best of all, nonprofits can gain those donors who shiver every time they pull out their wallets; to many people, a $10 text donation can seem more like a way to play with their phone than a way to spend their money. Mobile giving picks up so many lost donors that, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, it outpaces online donor acquisition 3:1.
It’s so simple that anyone can do it, right? Well actually, not quite. Mobile giving is not for everyone, and certainly not for every organization. Here’s why.
Size does matter
Mobile giving campaigns are not like Causes on Facebook, where any nonprofit can join up and start fundraising with the click of a button. In the US, the platform is highly regulated by the Mobile Giving Foundation, who imposes standards and regulations on nonprofits wishing to utilize text-to-give. These rules are important for keeping the industry safe from spammers, hackers and thieves, but they can be limiting.
The primary imposition is that organizations must have gross revenue of at least $500,000, leaving many small nonprofits in the dust. With expensive setup, monthly and per transaction fees, as well as potentially pricey advertising costs, most small nonprofits will not be able to incur enough ROI to justify a mobile campaign… at least not yet. As mobile giving proliferates, prices will go down as companies like CauseCast begin to offer cheaper platforms. Also, as noted on Social Citizens, mobile service providers may eventually see mobile giving as a perfect CSR opportunity, waiving the backend fees which add to these costs.
Until that time, we’ll have to rely on larger nonprofits like the Red Cross or the United Way to push the momentum of mobile giving forward, and they are. The Mobile Giving Foundation has launched more than 800 campaigns since 2007, and new campaigns are popping up every day. For example, the World Wildlife Federation has just launched a new mobile campaign to protect tigers from extinction. Campaigns are being launched everywhere, for every cause, expanding the donor base and the audience for mobile giving, but there is still a long ways to go.
Ask the audience
With over five billion cell phone connections worldwide (280 million in America), cell phones outnumber computers, making mobile users the largest global audience for fundraising solicitations; however, only 27% of mobile users will actually donate using their phones. The reason is that the mobile audience is highly segmented, and maximization of the mobile donor base can depend on many factors. For example, mobile giving happens to be very successful among members of the millennial generation, but older generations tend to have more reservations about this platform because they are not as familiar with the technology and because they have less trust in its security.
Another “demographic” potentially left out of the mix is the engaged donor. On our blog we love to talk about how new technologies allow supporters to play a larger role in the philanthropic process, and create stronger relationships between organizations and donors. Mobile giving tends to buck against this trend. While they may inspire more people to donate, text-to-give campaigns limit the amount of follow up information that can be shared, they don’t encourage repeat donations and they don’t allow the donor the ability to choose the amount of their donation. Network for Good reported an average donation of $92 in 2009, a far cry from the $10 maximum currently allowed in mobile giving, which leaves both the donor and the nonprofit short changed to some extent.
As the entire process is complete in an instant, the relationship between the nonprofit and the donor tends to expire once your finger hits the “send” button. This goes against the ideology behind the rise of social media, where donors can watch, interact with and even advertise the organization they are donating to. On the bright side, with the rise of smart phones, this is very much subject to change; there’s a good chance that text-to-give platforms might soon develop symbiotic relationships with applications like Twitter or Facebook and make mobile giving more “social”.
To the future…. and beyond
In its current state, text-to-give campaigns should be used as part of a package of fundraising and outreach techniques; they are not the messianic answer some nonprofits are looking for. But mobile giving – or really mobile technology – is improving every day. Though there are various limitations and barriers to entry restricting the effectiveness of text-to-give campaigns right now, the rapid pace of technological innovation and adaptation could transform mobile giving from a successful fundraising movement to an all-out-revolution in nonprofit outreach, as it has already done in other parts of the world.
As more and more devices (and thus, people) are coming equipped with internet access and applications, mobile giving will become easier, cheaper and more engaging both for organizations and for donors. Your great grandmother may not be texting for tigers and auto-tweeting her donation via her Android 7 quite yet, but give it some time. I believe that mobile giving and text-to-give campaigns will continue to grow and outpace all other methods of nonprofit outreach, that is, until the next new technology comes along and changes the game all over again.
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