• Only 1% of consumers say they currently receive deal alerts on their mobile phones but 27% say they would welcome such messages, as long as they came from merchants they’ve given permission to send offers.
• Consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 are the most receptive with 42% of respondents saying they would like to get marketing messages from favored merchants.
• 37% of consumers in households with children would like to receive opt-in alerts and in families with children under six that rises to 44%.
• 22% of mobile phone owners responded that they make an impulse purchase at least once a week based on a sale or special promotional event.

Here at Mobile Commons we’ve seen these trends firsthand with our retail customers. One customer recently ran a 48 hour “weekend only” sale for its mobile subscribers that resulted in a 50% conversion rate and a 10% increase in their average purchase size. Another client has been averaging a $10 return for every text message they’ve sent this year!

If you’re interested in learning more about our program geared specifically to retailers please don’t hesitate to contact us.

There were 41 patients in the study who recently underwent a liver transplant. They showed “significant improvement” in medication compliance after 1 year. The media age of the patients was 15.

Mobile Commons has worked with a number of organizations and state health departments, including New York and California, to test the efficacy of using text messaging to improve public health. We’ve seen these organizations and other health-related organizations use mobile technology to help improve smoking cessation rates, increase drug compliance, deliver vaccination reminders, and assist with blood pressure monitoring.

It’s also important to note that the job isn’t finished and there’s still lots more research to be done. As the researchers of the recent study commented, “the results of this pilot study are encouraging, however, larger, randomized controlled studies are needed to establish the efficacy of text messaging in improving medication adherence.”

If your organization is interested in conducting your own study using text messaging or phone calls to improve patient care, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to provide the platform for your research.

With so much media and marketing hype around devices like the iPhone, it’s sometimes easy to forget the true killer mobile apps: phone calls and text messaging. They work on every phone and remain the most effective way to reach people.

So if text messaging is the most popular way to communicate in the world, and it’s popularity continues to grow, why isn’t your organization using it yet?

As you can see, the response rate is extremely high, but also incredibly fast. This is great when you want to flood phone lines or play a recorded audio message, but doesn’t work very well when connecting to a live operator. For example, when important legislation is on the table, tens of thousands of phone calls are made, sometimes to a single number (say, the White House). This overwhelms the operators and sometimes even the switchboard. Not the best result if you’re really trying to have your voice heard.

When setting up your next mobile messaging campaign, it’s important to think about the action you’re trying to get people to do. For some use-cases, such as generating phone calls, it makes sense to throttle your messages and slow things down. Maybe by a few hours, or maybe even over the course of a few days. Remember to keep in mind local business hours and time zone differences. When you use Message Throttling, customers get all the benefits of combining SMS and voice applications: high response rates, quantifiable results and analysis, and real-time legislative lookup, without the overwhelming spike of calls in the beginning.

It didn’t quite work out the way we planned; we received no donations over the phone.

It did, however, produce a very interesting result–people who got the text message gave online with an increased response rate of 77%!

We suppressed a third of their list to see if the text had any effect on online giving, and it turned out to have a huge impact.

Download the Full Case Study (pdf)

We are excited about all the different ways people are pushing mobile fundraising and we hope that this integrated approach becomes another arrow in the mobile fundraising quiver.

We get tons of questions about mobile giving, how it works, and what is required to get started.  We’ve quickly realized that there is a lack of useful information currently available on the web for organizations trying to learn.  A Google search for “mobile giving” currently returns links to the Mobile Giving Foundation, a year-old article on Mobile Active, and a 6-month-old article from about.com.

We couldn’t find very many useful sites with case studies, new campaigns, strategy tips, or other information about mobile giving.  We (and other vendors) certainly have lots information on our own company web sites, but that’s probably not the best place to showcase all the exciting things happening around mobile giving.

So today we’re proud to announce that Mobile Commons is sponsoring a new blog called Mobile Giving Insider.  The site provides useful information about mobile giving, resources for nonprofits (e.g. vendors, technical documentation, etc), and a detailed FAQ.  Additionally, it will be a blog with original reporting, highlights about exciting new campaigns that non-profits are launching, and informative case studies. We really hope this becomes a little community where lots of people can contribute, cross-post, and add your own original content.

The site is now up and running at http://mobilegivinginsider.com and you can subscribe to the RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/MobileGivingInsider.

Have any interesting news or case studies that you’d like to share or promote? Please email the editors at tips@mobilegivinginsider.com.

2008 was an exciting year for nonprofit mobile programs. Our friends at the Mobile Giving Foundation have gotten a lot of attention and deserve a huge amount of credit for convincing the major wireless carriers to pass through 100% of text-messaging donations raised through to the nonprofit community.

Our resolution is to work with the nonprofit community to make Mobile Fundraising really work for them.

How can we improve Mobile Fundraising 1.0?

If your organization gets a $5 gift, even if it gets a lot of $5 gifts, how valuable is the $5 if you can’t communicate further with your donor and continue building the relationship?

What if you could get a $5 donation and send a personalized thank you note? What if you could ask your donor to attend an event, participate in a call-in advocacy campaign, spread things online, or volunteer at a local chapter? What if you could ask that same $5 donor to give again? What if you could build clever social networking applications to rally huge groups of people that you can follow up with later? What if you could capture your donors’ email addresses, synchronize them with your CRM, and coordinate your next online giving campaign with text message reminders to participate?

Mobile Commons resolves to work to make all those things possible that aren’t currently available with the existing mobile giving applications (including our own), make them easy to use, and make them produce real results.

We can’t do it alone. Want to join our resolution? Text “RESULTS” to 69866!

At the invitation of Convio, other bloggers have also written about their 2009 resolutions. Here’s to sticking with them:

• Judi Sohn at A View from Judi Sohn
• Michael Cervino at Beaconfire Wire
• Beth Kanter at Beth’s Blog
• Jordan Viator at Convio Connection Café
• Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog
• David Neff at FI Space
• Holly Ross at NTEN Blog
• Roger Carr at Everyday Giving Blog
• Peter Deitz at Social Actions Blog
• Robert L. Weiner at Tech Soup and Robert L. Weiner Blog
• Wendy Covey at TREW Marketing Spotlight

Rock the Vote’s Executive Director Heather Smith shared one of the organization’s most effective strategies on a panel earlier this year: fueling the youth movement on the “4th screen” to mobilize youth voters like never before. And though text messaging may sound like an unlikely tactic to get Gen Yers to take action (and rather one that’s primarily used as a social communications tool) Rock the Vote’s results are astounding.

Out of the 1.4 million names they have in their email house file (as of May of 2008), 12% opt in to cell phone messaging. And when texts are sent out on Election Day with a reminder to vote and a link to the voter’s poll location, turnout increases by 4%.

I think one of the main points to be emphasized is the personal nature of text-messaging. Heather says that a text message reminder is as effective as a qualified phone call. This is a point that we’ve made before, but is really the thing about text messaging that’s beginning to get a lot of positive numbers behind it.

Jim, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to start the Mobile Giving Foundation?

Sure, my background is inclusive of being a co-founder of a company called m-Qube. We were one of the first to develop the direct to consumer mobile content market in North America. We really helped pioneer the notion that it’s all about consumer control where the consumer—not the carrier—is deciding what they want, where, when and how they access information, content and entertainment. m-Qube was sold to VeriSign a few years ago who in turn has been a significant contributor to the Mobile Giving Foundation.

I have also been very active across the wireless industry, including serving as the Global Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association from 2003 to 2006. We worked with application providers, media companies, ad agencies, content providers and the wireless carriers to establish standards for mobile application behavior and consumer protection.

While at m-Qube, I led an effort in partnership with the US wireless carriers and the CTIA, when both Katrina and the Asian Pacific Tsunami occurred to enable emergency relief donations with a 100% pass through using a premium SMS transaction on your mobile device. People’s response to the relief donations was amazing and underscored an empowerment that came with the ability for people to respond immediately – or by impulse – to such an overwhelming need. After m-Qube was acquired by VeriSign, I wanted to take what we’d done for those special events and make it available for all charitable organizations as part of my commitment to give back.

And what did you see as the main barrier to opening up mobile fundraising?

Well, what was missing was the operational layer between carriers and nonprofit organizations so that both parties could have confidence in the system and that the process itself enabled an acceptable rate of pass through to the recipient foundation. We also wanted to do it in such a way that donors and potential donors saw their phone as a viable and trusted way to make micro-donations. The Mobile Giving Foundation, as a 501(c)3, provides this operational layer.

Can you speak a little more about the operational layer and what that entails?

The operational layer facilitates the ability for nonprofits to interact with their donors through the mobile channel, regardless of what phone service donors use. The MGF provides the technical connectivity layer and the business agreements that transmit messages and billing events, and frames the standards and best practices by which money can be raised where a billing event occurs on the carrier bill. The Mobile Giving Foundation extends this operational layer to a broader ecosystem that includes application providers like you [Mobile Commons], the wireless carriers, and the nonprofit organizations. Fundamentally, it’s a way for nonprofits to reach their donors. Those donors are also customers of the wireless carriers.

We also make sure that all federal and state laws are complied with and donors get receipted. A big part of the operational responsibility is message delivery and the billing that allows the donor to make a $5 or $10 contribution that appears on the carrier phone bill. That donation gets remitted to the Mobile Giving Foundation and then we settle with the partner charity. When you look at the billing process and the messaging systems of each carrier, they’re very different. When you look at it from an operational perspective, we remove those complexities for nonprofits and application providers. We then provide a receipt to the donor for their contribution.

Why did you use the term micro-donations?

By definition, it’s a micro-donation because of the price point ($5 and $10) and means of conveyance on the carrier bill. When you start something new, it’s important to keep it simple. The Mobile Giving Foundation elected to go with a price point that is acceptable to all wireless carriers and try to keep some commonality around those price points as new giving programs go to market. As consumers become more educated, they’ll realize this is a mechanism to make donations and as those consumers become more comfortable, you’ll see more innovation around price points—but, there will always be a cap. This is one of many cost elements that show up on a consumer’s carrier bill.

Why did you decide to make the Mobile Giving Foundation a nonprofit?

There are several reasons. First, my goal is to help the wireless industry apply resources that support worthy causes. Second, I want to help establish a new level of efficiency using wireless resources and try to keep the overhead costs to nonprofits at 10% or less than the amount they raise using the channel. Third, I want this channel to be trusted by donors, charities and carriers. It seemed to me like the best way to provide end-to-end protection and accomplish these goals was to make the Mobile Giving Foundation a 501(c)3 with the MGF serving as an umbrella for the donation, collection, remittance and advisement process.

Can you speak to the direct responsibilities of the Mobile Giving Foundation in the approval process for fundraising programs?

The MGF certifies that a nonprofit meets the established criteria for mobile giving, and reviews and approves that a specific mobile giving campaign meets our standards and those established by other industry organizations such as the MMA. The processes used to create these standards and criteria include representatives from interests across the spectrum. It is important to us that the MGF helps ensure the integrity of mobile giving by focusing on clarity to donors when they are asked to give and transparency for donors when a gift has been made.

What’s the timing like in the approval process?

For the foreseeable future, it’s a manual process with heavy overhead. We are working within a system and with processes developed to support commercial premium transactions. NPO qualifications, campaign approvals, short code provisioning, billing system updates, application testing all currently translate to approximately an 8 week time frame. This will eventually get shorter as our own capabilities improve and our processes are streamlined.

Any Closing Thoughts?

I’m very pleased that we can make available a whole new fundraising channel to nonprofits, and just as importantly, help provide a channel for a new, younger demographic to explore, learn and give to causes of interest to them. I’m particularly delighted that the wireless carriers see the value of supporting this effort, and doing so on a no cost basis. They have been generous in helping pioneer this new channel. Of course, we love the fact that companies like Mobile Commons and others have stepped up and leveraged their technology in the giving space. Our collective efforts will literally help change to face of giving today.

• What changed? Before the advent of the Mobile Giving Foundation (the MGF) the carriers took a fee of approximately 50% of all money charged to a customers phone bill. The MGF was formed to provide approved 501(c)3 organizations the ability to raise money and have carriers waive the fee. The major carriers and the MGF have agreed to allow the MGF to administer the approval process for selecting qualified 501(c)3’s.
• How does it work? Every 501(c)3 organization that wants to do a mobile fundraising campaign must directly enter into an agreement with MGF that must be approved by both MGF and the major carriers.
• Why do I need Mobile Commons? You don’t. You do, however, need a mobile application service provider (MASP), of which we are one. There are currently five service providers approved by the MGF.
• Does it matter which service provider I use? From the perspective of carrier and MGF approval, no service provider has an advantage over another. And currently no service providers have their profile data or applications integrated with the Mobile Giving Foundation. All giving programs are run directly from the MGF application. Over time, tighter technical integration will be possible and Mobile Commons will provide a total mobile solution for advocacy and fundraising.
• How much does it cost? The MGF charges between 5% and 10% of the total amount raised. On top of that each application service provider charges a fee. Mobile Commons fees are available on request. The other MASP’s charge in other ways.
• How can I learn more? Click here for more information such as use cases or contact us at info@mcommons.com.