Mobile Fundraising Overview on MobileActive.org
Katrin Verclas posted an excellent and very in-depth article all about the current state of mobile giving on the Mobile Active blog. Anyone interested in mobile fundraising should absolutely read the entire post, as she explains things clearly and includes some great use-cases and examples.
The article first discusses premium SMS (e.g. text GIVE to a short code), which has been the focus of Mobile Giving Insider. She provides an overview of the Mobile Giving Foundation, which should be very well known to readers of this site. She the includes a handful of examples about successful campaigns from the past year.
The article continues to discuss alternative fundraising approaches using mobile. For example, Mobile Commons uses text messaging to trigger phone calls allowing organizations to collect donations from a phone bank via credit card. Twitter is another example of how mobile has also been used to raise money for charity, such as the recent Twestival campaign that raised money for Charity: Water.
As Verclas concludes:
There is still much to be explored in this multi-channel universe and the organizations that are thinking creatively and innovatively about mobile giving but it is clear that this channel is going to take off as people get used to the idea and nonprofits become more clever in integrating mobiles into their strategies.
I think she is spot-on with this point. As such, we think it makes sense to really expand the scope of this blog to include all sorts of information about using mobile to raise money. Up until now, we’ve really focused on just premium SMS. You can expect our posts in the future to explore a wide array of mobile fundraising topics. As always, feedback is very welcome!
