CONVERTING MOBILE DONORS

Boomers and GenXers can't live without email; Millennials (now referred to as Generation O) can't live without their mobile phones. Barrack Obama used a cutting edge text message campaign to sway voters and encourage financial support – John McCain didn’t. On Election Day U.S. subscribers transmitted more than 1.2 billion text messages between 7 p.m. and midnight EST. Last year, total mobile Web users grew by 23 million. For non-profit organizations, this is an incredible new communication tool.

One example: R & B singer Alicia Keys had a big hand (thumb might be more accurate) in raising money to fight AIDS through one of the first text message donation efforts. During her "As I Am" concert tour she showed a clip from her film "Alicia in Africa: Journey to the Motherland" and encouraged fans to donate $5 by text messaging the word 'ALIVE' to 90999. She raised $40,000 from around 8,000 people with the mobile giving campaign. (Go to http://www.mgive.com/, the service provider that enabled a small donation to be charged to the donor's cell phone bill, collected from cell phone carriers, and distributed to the non-profit organization.) This was a valuable fundraising mechanism for Keep A Child Alive's efforts to combat the African AIDS pandemic.*

The long-term and larger considerations for organizations are whether mobile donors can become long-lasting contributors and whether they can become larger donors. While mobile fundraising can bring in money with little expense, fundraising is about relationship building. Mobile fundraising circumvents relationships.

Incorporating mobile communications into existing customer relationship management systems is critical. So far, mobile donations are micro-gifts, effective for impulse giving and emotional calls to action. Handled correctly they might lend themselves to a monthly giving option. I particularly like the ability to activate supporters on issues or events, as Obama did.

There are ways to synchronize donor profile information each time someone opts-in through a mobile phone and replies with an email address. (For those of you who can understand this: a Mobile Application Service Provider, like mgive.com, which charges for setup, monthly usage, and per-message usage, contacts say Convio's Constituent API -- Application Programming Interfaces which supply the technical hooks that link applications together for the purpose of sharing data -- which sends email address and source code to Convio's database that eventually makes it into an organization's donor management database.** Whew!) Organizations can track the conversion of small mobile donors or mobile advocacy participants, measure gift giving and provide basic reporting which can lead to actionable insights.

Rev up your thumbs, folks, and see how this new fundraising mechanism evolves.

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*Over 28 million people are dead and 15 million orphaned; an African child dies from AIDS every minute.
** Thanks Arbor Solutions, Inc.