Did you know US non-profits can collect charitable contributions via SMS text message? Consumers donate using just their mobile phone with the charge showing up on their monthly phone bill.
Mobile Giving Insider is the leading resource for information and all the latest news about mobile giving and charitable donations over SMS.
Jim Manis, Founder and CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton announced today at a press briefing that the US will give $110 million in humanitarian aid to Pakistan.
During her announcement, she unveiled a new mobile giving program being run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. She urged citizens to text SWAT to 20222 to donate $5 to help provide food, water, and shelter for Pakistani citizens.
First American Idol and now Hilary Clinton? This is a very high profile week for the Mobile Giving Foundation!
Try it! Text SWAT to 20222 to donate $5 to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Open Doors is running a really innovative mobile giving campaign. Rather than using the usual “Text $5 to our organization” message, their call to action is “Text a Bible”. For every $5 text donation they receive, they will send a bible somewhere in the world!
With so much excitement on this blog about different mobile giving technologies, sometimes we forget to showcase how creative the organizations powering these campaigns can be. Just check out their You Tube ad above.
Try it! Text BIBLE to 20222
Keep a Child Alive has released stats from last night’s American Idol call to action. They raised a whopping $450,000 from over 90,000 donors! This was the first nationwide prime time mobile giving call to action and by far the largest SMS fundraising campaign to date.
Alicia Keys appears on American Idol tonight and asked fans to text the word ALIVE to 90999 and donate $5 to Keep a Child Alive, the charity she co-founded. American Idol has a massive viewership, many of whom are experienced texters, so hopefully they got a strong response and raised a lot of money.
Try it! Text ALIVE to 90999
It’s been a pretty exciting spring for mobile fundraising. In the past few months, the number of companies providing mobile giving functionality has doubled and the list of charities getting started with mobile donations over SMS just keeps growing!
For example, this week PollEverywhere announced a partnership that combines their text-2-screen and polling tools with MobileCause’s mobile donation program. GuideByCell recently launched their new GiveByCell product. And Red Fish Media has released their GiveOnTheGo giving solution.
It’s very exciting to see more and more non-profits trying out mobile giving. And it’s also fascinating to watch as new and different players enter the market. As competition heats up, I suspect we’ll start to see some pretty amazing innovation as more non-profits integrate mobile into their arsenal, including SMS advocacy tools and integrated CRM solutions.
Christian Zimmern of the Mobile Giving Foundation and Suzy Twohig of Share our Strength are going to be interviewed today on BlogTalkRadio about mobile donations via premium SMS. Listen in today, March 30th at 4pmEDT.
This is a nice blog post on the Connected Thinking Blog recounting a presentation by Mark Miller, Director, Philanthropic Marketing & Communications at Children’s National Medical Center and Jim Manis, Chairman of Mobile Giving Foundation.
They ran a program with the Washington Nationals baseball team to raise money for Washington Nationals Diabetes Care Complex.
The article describes the program and, more importantly, the marketing effort that went into the campaign.
They spent a huge amount of time advertising the program, including press releases, Facebook messages, pamphlets, t-shirts, stickers, a video, and ads in the program.
While they did raise a nice sum of money, they also offer a few tips and lessons learned: repeat the ask over, include more emotion in the ask, and spend less on promotion.
Read the full article at the Connected Thinking Blog.
Try it! Text NATS to 90999.
Keep a Child Alive and STA Travel are sponsoring a contest to create a public service announcement advertising their mobile giving program.
Students submit a 60 second PSA video urging people to “text ALIVE to 90999.” The winner gets a trip to Africa to work with Keep a Child Alive on the ground for one week in January 2010!
The NonProfit Times is running an article about mobile donations. It discusses the recent success of Teleton (which we’ve covered before), but also spends a lot of time talking about how mobile giving is really part of a much larger mobile strategy, which in turn is part of a larger communication strategy for an organization.
The article also points out that the value of mobile donations really goes up for organizations that have the facility to make strong calls-to-action:
Organizations should craft a compelling call to action that requires a quick response or an urgent ask. Calls to action that are tied to disaster relief or breaking news might compel people to start texting and giving, as they did during recent natural disasters. ”Organizations with the opportunity to have those calls to action are going to succeed much more than organizations that don’t in the universe of mobile donations,” said [Mobile Commons CEO ] Jed Alpert.
In other words, just slapping a “Text GIVE to 12345” banner on your website isn’t going to cut it:
“Just like in the email world, if you recently acquired a list of email addresses from your old direct mail file and you sent those constituents a single email to give online, you aren’t going to see stellar results. The same ideas of relationship management also apply to mobile.” said Matt Wilson (Director of partnerships at Mobile Commons]
The article concludes by discussing the possibilities that open up once you start treating mobile as a true communication channel and not a standalone silo. As you collect information about users, you can segment them by demographic, location, donor.
Organizations should try to segment messages by ZIP codes to remind donors about events in their community or state and can give donors more information about specific campaigns via email. “That way you can build a real record in your eCRM database as opposed to having just a list of mobiles,” said Tony Aiello (SVP at Mobile Accord).
