Mobile Donations in the NonProfit Times
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).
