Donor Power Blog: Mobile giving: What's it worth?

To hear some people talk, you might think "mobile giving" -- where donors use their mobile phone to text a certain word to a certain number, which triggers a small donation to a cause to be charged to the cell-phone bill -- is the future of fundraising.

There's a good how-to on mobile giving at About.com's Nonprofit Charitable Orgs blog: Mobile Giving - How to Make it Work for Your Nonprofit. It gives this example:

Recently, Alicia Keys ... asked concert goers to pull out their cell phones and text the word "ALIVE" .... More than 8,000 people did so right at the concerts, raising more than $40,000 to fight AIDS.

Raising $40,000 from 8,000 people sounds pretty cool. But it's unambitious. You should be able to net more than $1 million from that many donors -- if you're smart and patient (willing to wait a few years).

Real fundraising is about building relationships with donors. The real pay-off comes when the relationships are most developed.

Mobile fundraising specifically avoids relationships; you walk away with some impressive cash from a very attractive investment -- but you have no idea who gave it to you. There's no next step.

I wouldn't completely ignore it. Mobile fundraising may be a good and cost-effective way to raise funds from young people, who are unlikely to stick with you anyway. It's just revenue you wouldn't get otherwise, even though it has no future. The cost of getting the money is low -- usually just 5¢ on the dollar, plus whatever it costs to get out the word in the first place.

And better yet, I've read that they're talking about a monthly giving option for mobile donors. And who knows what next generation devices and services might offer that allow connection and relationship-building.

Keep your eyes on it.

More about Mobile giving at GenerationYGive: Mobileization: Is it keeping you up at night? and Mobileization: Part II.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech

Comments

Jeff- Great Post!

We are the guys powering Keep a Child Alive's mobile donation campaign and about 25 more. Their campaign with Alicia Keys was the first ongoing campaign that utilized mobile donations, and being first large scale test it was quite a success. We have some upcoming campaigns that show significant promise.

We hope to see monthly recurring donations approved by the carriers sometime in the next month, with a multiple campaigns following shortly. A Recurring Donation campaign allows the nonprofit to start a conversation with their donor, and build a relationship.

I would love to answer any questions you or your readers have.

Posted by: Stephen Joos | 11 September 2008 at 10:24

This is an exciting opportunity for fundraisers. I work for Big Brothers Big Sisters in Kansas City and we are finalizing our agreement with the Mobile Giving Foundation to be able to do similar fundraising efforts. Since March, we have been using a text option to recruit volunteers with success. Obviously, this method of fundraising won't be our main source, but we see it as a great opportunity to increase revenue with special events and potentially a large scale effort involving several local radio stations.

Thanks for the updated info. I am not sure how much info on the donors we will receive at this time, but hoping for the best.

Posted by: Patrick Sallee | 11 September 2008 at 15:50

Over at Mobile Commons, we also have a few clients that are just about to launch with the mobile giving foundation, and we are excited to watch this new fundraising channel evolve. Additionally, we are taking the approach that integrating mobile communications into your existing CRM systems is critical to organizations that have already learned the value of proper donor management.

For example, we have about 10 clients that are synchronizing constituent profile information each time someone opts-in through his or her mobile phone and replies back with email address. We ping Convio's Constituent API, which sends email address and source code to Convio's database, which eventually makes it into an organization's donor management database, such as MoneyMaker, to track the value of that new constituent over time. This allows organizations to track the conversion of small mobile donors or mobile advocacy participants into large direct mail or online donors down the road.

Posted by: Matt Wilson | 11 September 2008 at 16:33

I enjoyed the articles and would like to know some places that support the mobile giving network and their contact info.
Thanks.

Posted by: Tim D. | 12 September 2008 at 11:13

Tim, there are currently five companies that work with the Mobile Giving Foundation. The two that work primarily with non-profits are:

Mobile Commons

mGive

They both have different pricing that works differently at scale. If you're curious about what kind of relationship they have to the MGF, I recommend two blog posts: