We spent a lot of time at the end of 2008 working with one of our clients, the Humane Society of the United States, and our friends at the Watershed Company to come up with a nice mobile test for end of year fundraising. We wanted to give mobile subscribers an option to donate over the phone via an inbound call center after they received a text message promoting the call.
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.
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.
At Mobile Commons, we are obviously very excited about the growing popularity of mobile donations and thrilled at how many organizations are embracing mobile technology.
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.
Instead of creating a resolution for the nonprofit community, we thought we would take a look in the mirror and recruit the community to help us achieve a resolution together. We want you to help us improve Mobile Fundraising.
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:
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.
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