By Darian Rodriguez Heyman

More and more nonprofit donations take place in today’s digital landscape, but how can causes ensure their online storefront is not only open for business, but optimized?

As I explored this critical issue in my new book, Nonprofit Fundraising 101, I interviewed Roderick Campbell, the CEO of nonprofit fundraising platform CommitChange. He shared a few takeaways from their efforts to maximize digital donations for Mercy House, a $3.8M nonprofit that has provided housing and support to California’s homeless since 1989.

This simple formula helped Mercy House double online giving in just six months, and I believe it can do the same for your nonprofit, too:

1. Break it Down: CommitChange helped Mercy House break the donation process down into four steps: recurring versus one-time; amount; info; and payment. Instead of asking for the information all at once, they simplified the process, which is especially helpful for digital donors contributing on their mobile device. Another great example of what this looks like is charity: water, also profiled in the book.

Whatever your process, be sure to look closely at recurring giving, as this creates valuable ongoing funding for your cause, increases gifts since people are more likely to donate $10 a month versus $120 now, and simple tweaking here can yield tremendous results: by leading with the recurring gift option, Mercy House increased the number of donors signing up as sustaining members by 400%!

2. Stay Consistent: The data proves what we all know in our guts: nobody likes to feel like they’re leaving your website once they hit that donate button. So be sure to keep the look and feel of your donate page consistent with your website and other communication materials and ensure your logo remains visible throughout the giving experience. This simple change helped Mercy House convert more of the people who clicked “donate” to actual supporters, while simultaneously increasing average gift size.

3. Streamline Donations: Less is more, and once someone clicks “donate,” your job is to make the giving process as simple as possible. In fact, CommitChange discovered that every field eliminated from the donation experience increases conversion by 2%. They further optimized conversion rates by adding some simple programming, so when Mercy House website visitors click the donate button, a new tab opens up exclusively dedicated to the donation process, ensuring a closed environment free of distractions.

By making these three simple changes, Mercy House was able to improve online giving by 110% in just six months, and it didn’t stop there. They continued to enjoy the fruits of their labor and saw an additional 73% increase in the six months after that. The point is, if you take the time to build a solid foundation for the house that is your online giving experience, the sky is the limit to what becomes possible.

Bio

Darian Rodriguez Heyman is an accomplished fundraiser, social entrepreneur, and best-selling author. His work “helping people help” started during his five-year tenure as Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation, after which he edited the best-selling book, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals (Wiley & Sons) and co-founded the global conference series, Social Media for Nonprofits and Sparrow: Mobile for All. His new book, Nonprofit Fundraising 101, is the first truly comprehensive yet practical guide to all aspects of fundraising for your cause, and chapters 15 – 18 are dedicated to online giving. Heyman is also an in-demand fundraising consultant and a frequent keynote speaker at social impact events around the globe.

The post How to Double Online Giving in Six Months appeared first on Socialbrite.

Make donating simple, say thank you & showcase your results to keep donations coming

Target audience: Nonprofits, fundraisers, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises.

Acquiring a new donor is more expensive than keeping a current donor.

Most nonprofits know this, but it seems like most of them spend a larger amount of their resources on acquiring new donors instead of keeping their current donors happy.

Plus, the lifetime dollar value of a happy donor is way more than the value of a donor who only gives once.

And the math just makes sense:

Higher acquisition costs + lower donations = 

Following are seven ways to help you turn this sad face upside down:

Say thanks

1Can you believe that even some huge organizations with ample resources fail to say thank you once a donation is made? Research shows that thanking donors increases the likelihood they’ll continue to give, and increase the amount they’ll give.

Give your supporters better tools

2You know what has made Amazon a billion dollar success? They’ve optimized their purchase down to a single mouse-click.

Same thing goes for your top social fundraisers.

Don’t give your top fundraisiers a clunky platform. Give them something powerfully simple, like Razoo and get rid of the ugly PayPal button on your website.

Plug up the holes in your website

3There are critical pages on your website where you want visitors to complete a specific transaction, such as donating money or joining an email list.

Sadly, these pages are often the reasons why people aren’t donating as much as they would. This free eBook includes 15 ways to improve these landing pages.

Make your supporters’ agendas your agenda

4One way to keep your top supporters interested and committed is to support their agendas! For example, if one of your top supporters publishes a blog about why the cause is personal, you need to be retweeting their blog posts.

Or if one of your top fundraisers owns a local restaurant, you’d better be holding some of your events there.

Constantly report outcomes

5I love what the Animal Rescue League of Boston does on Facebook. Almost every week, I see some kind of success story. As Alexandra mentioned, 53 percent of online donors in one study identified “achieving and communicating measurable results” as prominent in their decision to donate again. You want people to donate more than once? Report outcomes!

Develop one cause marketing partnership

6Cause marketing is a partnership between a nonprofit and a for-profit for mutual profit. And it’s probably one of the most overlooked, underutilized strategies for raising money.

Joe Waters has five tips for creating a cause marketing program for your organization.

Don’t shoot for perfection

7Trying to make everything perfect will only get nothing done. But “done” is what you want — not perfect!

Break your donor retention strategy down into to small chunks that you can do one at a time. Done… next… repeat.

What do you think?

The post 7 ways to increase your nonprofit’s donations appeared first on Socialbrite.

Leverage the power of #GivingTuesday to raise awareness & funds

Today charities, families, businesses and folks like you will come together to help create #GivingTuesday. This creates an opportunity to join a massive trending conversation on social media that will surely create more awareness for your cause.

How can your nonprofit join #GivingTuesday? After you become a #GivingTuesday partner, create a Partner Page to be featured on the GivingTuesday website.

Then use your existing social channels to tell your people about #GivingTuesday:

• Encourage your supporters to join the #GivingTuesday community.
• Email your people with sample tweets and Facebook updates they can use to talk about your cause. (Make sure you keep these short and sweet, and include the hashtag #GivingTuesday.)
• Tweet with the hashtag #GivingTuesday to drive people to your #GivingTuesday page.
• Create a few #GivingTuesday pictures you can post on your page with conditional sharing.
• Share these ideas with your sponsors and other local businesses.

Get more ideas on #GivingTuesday

Check out these ideas for local businesses and families, and see what other nonprofits are doing today. Share your ideas for #GivingTuesday below!

The post Last call for your nonprofit to join #GivingTuesday appeared first on Socialbrite.

Get the most out of social, but don’t forget to go deep

Second of two parts. Also see:
• Why can’t I raise any money with social media?

Guest post by Ehren Foss
Co-founder and CEO, HelpAttack!

Last year I wrote a post for NTEN about four social media fundraising tools. (Socialbrite also ran: Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks.)

This year I’m going to take a vertical rather than horizontal approach, and identify several important types of tools you’ll want to consider when raising money online – either through your website or on a social network.

Shareable visual content, like the photo at top, relates to several important facets of social media fundraising: Is it easy to share on social networks? Does it link back to a page with a donation form or other action? Can you track who likes the content in your content relationship management system, if you have one?

The bedrock of online fundraising: Website donation forms

I think humble donation forms are the bedrock of online fundraising: You can steer people to them from elsewhere on your website, from email, from QR codes, and of course from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks. These forms can be great lead generation tools at the same time they are bringing in necessary revenue. While it seems like donation forms were “solved” years ago when our sector turned its attention to social fundraising and social media, many organizations are still struggling.

Some cause organizations that have invested in building their own forms find them difficult and expensive to maintain. I can see why: Simple forms are harder than they seem. You should:

• Ensure mobile friendliness and easy social network sharing
• Provide flexibility for varying needs of campaigns and programs
• Measure, tweak, and improve conversion rates by altering images, copy, and other attributes of the form
• Maintain a high level of security for PCI compliance

The alternative used to be directing your supporters off-site, to PayPal.com, Authorize.net, or other secure, but not as flexible (or branded), donation flows. My favorite tools these days embrace the best of both worlds.

Let someone else worry about HTML5, standards compliance, scalability, and usability while still enjoying the benefits of hosting the form at your own domain. Embedded forms usually have easy-to-use form building kits, too. Kimbia and FormStack are good examples, and both are starting to integrate with large customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce, Blackbaud, Salsa Labs, Fundly, and other nonprofit tradeshow regulars offer embedded forms, too.

Let’s get geeky: 4 ‘open graph’ tags you should be using

Everything you put on the Web can help – or hurt – your overall results. Does your website CMS (content management system) automatically create the proper meta tags for the big social networks? When someone shares a URL on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, what image, blurb, and text is included automatically? When someone pins a great image from your website, where do clicks on it end up?

If you view the HTML in a socially shareable Web page, you’ll see a set of meta tags. A good CMS (perhaps with a few plug-ins) should allow you to set up defaults for this kind of sharing, while allowing you to override titles, primary images, and other shared attributes as needed.

Your supporters will share the page you want them to, but they will also share pages buried deep in your site that you haven’t thought about in months. When they do, make it easy and effective.

These four “open graph” tags make Facebook and Twitter happy. The “title” tag is very important (it’s what shows up as the tab name in your browser). The “image_src” one helps your image show up in LinkedIn. Along with the description and keywords tags, they all help with search engine optimization too. (If you use these, be sure to insert your own information!)

<meta name=”og:type” content=”cause” /> <meta name=”go:image” content=”http://helpattack.com/images/helpattack_logo_200x121px.png” /> <meta name=”og:url” content=”http://www.helpattack.com” /> <meta name=”og:site_name” content=”HelpAttack!” /> <meta name=”fb:app_id” content=”117175691682196″ /> <meta name=”title” content=”HelpAttack! – Social Media Fundraising” /> <link rel=”image_src” href=”https://helpattack.com/images/helpattack_logo_200x121px.png” />

Adding social data to your supporter database

This is another foundation of online fundraising. Consider adding new fields for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, or other social network URLs that are important in your community of supporters to your CRM system.

This way, social data that you collect can inform your direct mail, email, volunteering, advocacy, and other efforts. You might be surprised to learn that your funders, board members, and partners use social media, too. There’s lots of talk about the return on investment of social media. Adding social data to your supporter database is a very important step in making sure you can increase and sustain the return on your invesment for years to come.

The simplest example to do this is by figuring out which people hate your paper mailings and want to hear more tailored messages from you online instead. Save money on your mailings and have happier supporters, too.

Getting this data out of Facebook and other networks can be a challenge, though. If appropriate, allow your users to share this information with you in other channels or with apps. Consider using apps that allow you to retain ownership over the data. SmallAct provides a lightweight social CRM platform called Thrive, and also allows organizations to mass update their contacts with social data. Blackbaud recently launched a “social score” tool, similar to Klout. Many other data sources are more focused on for-profit data and sales needs, but it’s worth checking out Rapleaf and Rapportive, their competitors.

Platform-specific donation apps

For most organizations, the Facebook tab donation form is still one of the only options out there. Twitter offers advertising, sponsored tweets, and sponsored #hashtags. Few organizations are asking for donations directly through LinkedIn (as it’s a much better place to find skilled volunteers or build your network, in my opinion). Pinterest and Tumblr are great places to share visual content, and a best practice is to make sure that content is linked back to a donation page or another place where supporters can take action.

While quite useful, tabs aren’t what they used to be. Tab engagement dropped more than 50% after the shift to Timeline. Remember, most supporters will interact with your content in their feeds, and won’t visit your page frequently. Expect low numbers from your tab apps, compared with your posts.

I’ve also noticed that lots of organizations still have Causes.com’s tab on their Facebook page. However, Causes has deprecated this tab and simply redirects clicks to causes.com. That said, once your page reaches a certain level of activity, tabs are still a worthwhile investment. It’s easy enough to add a donation form, a mailing list signup form, and perhaps one or two other action oriented tabs, and let them do their thing.

Remove the default Likes tab, since that information is available elsewhere. Assuming you’re sharing great visual content, keep the Photos tab. (You don’t have a choice anyway – that’s Facebook’s way of telling you how important visual content is.)

A caution against building custom native apps

If you are totally kicking butt at all of the above, and you see how your website, your other online communities, and your other channels are all flowing harmoniously together to drive donations and other actions, then good for you!

I caution against building custom native (iPhone, Android, Facebook timeline) apps unless all of the above is aces for your organization and you’ve run the numbers and are really sure your community is large enough or active enough to make a custom app worthwhile.

If you’re still tempted, then I suggest doing a simpler version as a proof of concept, or finding a similar app that you can borrow or customize.

Related

• Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks (Socialbrite)

• Social fundraising tools for nonprofits & causes (Socialbrite)

• What social fundraising means for your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

• Fundraising tools and tips (Socialbrite)

The post Tips & tools for effective online fundraising appeared first on Socialbrite.

Getting an army of Facebook fans for your nonprofit is not an easy feat. It takes lots of planning, hard work, and time. But just because you have a lot of Facebook fans doesn’t mean that you’re any closer to meeting your fundraising goals. Especially if you’re unknowingly creating barriers.

When potential donors go to your donation page, is it immediately clear how they can donate and what amount they can donate? Do they have to search around your site? How many mouse clicks does an entire transaction require?

7 things to keep in mind

1. Show Them Impact – One thing that worked very well during the Tweetsgiving campaign was showing people what their donations would buy. It created a direct line of site between donation and impact.
2. Make It Fun – Red Nose Day is a huge hit in the UK, precisely because it’s so much fun! Think of creative ways to make sharing fun for your fans.



3. Make The Dollar Amount Specific – The ever-present “donate now” button with no recommended dollar amounts, gets far less results than an ask with a specific dollar amount.
4. Make It Easy To Share – The moment a person donates is the best time to ask them to share that action with others. Applications like Giving Impact and givezooks do this really well with their social fundraising apps.
5. Target The Ask – Similar to most email marketing services, Facebook allows you to target your messages to a specific subset in your fanbase. You can slice by location, gender and age.



6. Measure The Ask – Measure traffic, clicks, average donation amounts and number of donations. With enough data, you’ll be able to refine your approach over time. Also, Facebook provides great analytics for their Facebook Pages.
7. Keep It Simple – Frank Barry wrote an excellent guest post on optimized social fundraising. Go back and check it out.

One last thought. Don’t be discouraged if your first attempts to spur fans to act don’t get the results you expect. It takes time to build an active community.

What’s been working for your org?

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

The post How do I get my nonprofit’s Facebook fans to donate? appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Frank Barry

As the Web becomes more social in nature, people grow to expect more social behavior on your website. Have you thought about how that affects you? Or how it affects the way people give online through your site?

Here are a few things to get you started. Hopefully they’ll give you ideas about how you can make the online giving experience more social for your donors! Once you’ve put some thought into it, I’d love to hear what you’ve decided to do (or please share a link in the comments if you are already doing some of these things).

Follow the rules

There are some well defined guidelines that everyone needs to know, but I’m not going to rehash this because it’s been covered well by the industry leading  Nielsen Norman Group in their study Donation Usability: 58 Design Guidelines for Improving the Donation Process and the Usability of Essential Information on Charity and Non-Profit Websites. You can read more about it on Steve MacLaughlin’s Blog.

For now, here are a few key points you can’t miss when it comes to making the online giving process more social.

• Explain why someone would be interested in donating.
• Use real examples of people you have helped and situations you have improved.
• Provide information about your organization’s presence on social outlets so users can connect with you on them.
• All this info shouldn’t live right on the page where the donation form is. Just make it easily accessible from the donation form.

Simple is always better

You’ll make it complicated for people to share if it’s complicated to give. Keep the goal in mind: You want people to give. Then you want people to pass on the opportunity of giving to their friends and family. Here are five quick tips. (Some thoughts on simplicity by Chris Brogan.)

• Don’t use too many fields or have too many options. You don’t need to collect three different addresses and info on where a person went to school when they give. Less is more.
• Don’t make your form multi-step. Keep it to one page and one step. Too many steps equals too many ways for a person to fall out of the process. Browser issues. Boredom. Distraction. See?
• Don’t use extraneous text/imagery. It’s a fact that giving people too many things to do or look at distracts them from the main goal. Keep it clean and simple.
• Always confirm payment immediately. Doing this makes people feel secure and confident in their decision. Security and confidence make people more inclined to share with others.
• Send an email confirmation quickly. This closes the deal and gives you an opportunity to thank a person for their time and money. A very important step! It’s also a great opportunity to ask the donor to share what they’ve done with their network (remember, their networks matter).

Make it shareable

Think back to the first point: Follow the rules. Explaining why someone would want to give and how you are making a difference makes people want to share with others. It gives them something to share. If people are giving to you it’s likely they’ll want to share that opportunity with their friends and family. Now it’s your job to make it easy for someone to do so.

Here are a few ideas.

• Don’t make people give to share. Check out what Tweetsgiving did. They asked people to tweet what they were grateful for with a link back to www.tweetsgiving.org – this helped to spread awareness.
• Use the AddThis plug-in on the donation form and the onscreen confirmation pages. It’s simple to add and makes it very easy for people to share via numerous social networks and email.
• Provide a way for people to share in the confirmation email. That is, use forward-to-a-friend type functionality and links to your Facebook and Twitter pages.

Go the extra mile

There are a couple things that have been cropping up more and more with social media campaigns and online giving: the idea of showing social proof and creating a friendly competition right your online giving pages.

• Social mentions / social proof – Showing social proof helps potential donors feel safer and builds excitement around the cause. If you see that something is “popular,” you’ll probably be more likely to join in, right? Check out what Epic Change did with Tweetsgiving (see top right area where it says “22,605 Thank You Notes”).
• Friendly competition – For some reason people like competition. It helps foster engagement and community (when friendly of course). Again, check out what Epic Change did with Tweetsgiving: See the “Top Turkeys” section in the lower right.

Discussion: What else have you seen going on? What’s caught your eye? What’s been working for you?

If you don’t want to miss out on the 31 Day Challenge To Optimize Your Blog With Social Media, please sign up.

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

The post How to make giving on your site more social appeared first on Socialbrite.

When you think of organizations and nonprofits that have made effective use of Web 2.0 technologies to raise funds for a cause, DonorsChoose.org should be near the top of a very short list.

And October is once again the month when bloggers step up to the plate for the Social Media Challenge, now in its third year. Last year, bloggers big and small raised $270,000 to provide 65,000 students with the resources needed to learn. This year, Twitter has joined the fray.

At Socialbrite, we’d like to call on our readers to support students in public school classrooms in low-income areas. The cool part? You get to decide which projects to support — and you’ll be able to hear directly from the students who received your donation.

Please make a donation on the Socialbrite Giving Page. Some of the donations will have twice the impact because of a matching grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

And, of course, you can always create your own Giving Page.

Meantime, if you’re not familiar with DonorsChoose, the idea is a simple one: It’s a site where public school teachers could post what materials they were lacking in the classroom. Requests stay up for five months or until they’re fully funded.

Interview with founder Charles Best

I recently buttonholed founder and CEO Charles Best to get a first-hand account of the groundbreaking charity and its model for funding public school projects around the country. Charles thought up the site during a lunch conversation with colleagues at a public high school in the Bronx where he was a social studies teacher for five years, and his students volunteered to help start the organization. They hope individuals will contribute around $17 million this year for books, field trips, art supplies and technology needed by classrooms in low-income areas.

Watch, embed or download the 6-minute video on Vimeo
Watch the video in H.264 on Ourmedia

Some highlights from our chat:

• During the 2007 Blogger Challenge, he said, “we saw that a handful of bloggers who wouldn’t appear on the Technorati top 100 list and don’ have huge readerships were actually capable of raising the most money from their readers because they have a personal relationship with their followers.”

• With micro-giving, “someone with $10 or $25 to give can be a philanthropist. and get the same kind of accountability and vivid feedback that bill gates gets when he gives $1 million,” he said.

• The main reason it works is that you get to see how your donation was spent, you get photos from the classroom, and you get a personal reply from the teacher or students.

• There are 12,000 to 14,000 classroom project requests on the site at a time. About two-thirds get fully funded before they hit their expiration date.

• DonorsChoose is a great target for companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility programs. “Companies have a new ability to empower their customers to be philanthropists, to open source their philanthropy and let their customers or employees participate as grant makers,” he said.

• Long term, DonorsChoose wants raise $100 million a year for public classrooms this way.

The post Bloggers: Please come through again for DonorsChoose appeared first on Socialbrite.

Mobile giving via SMS in the United States and many other parts of the world, has been out of reach because of high carrier charges — up to 50% of a donation would go to the telcom — unacceptable to most charities.

But this has changed in the last two years. Mobile donation campaigns in the United States that go through the Mobile Giving Foundation are not subject to the high carrier fees. The Mobile Giving Foundation charges a smaller percentage fee — currently 10%. As a result, in 2008 the field of mobile giving in the U.S. attracted the attention by organizations large and small, including by such brands as UNICEF, the Salvation Army, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

in England, there is also talk about establishing an entity similar to the Mobile Giving Foundation that would negotiate a no-fee arrangement with the operators and vet charities for SMS giving campaigns.

How does mobile giving work?

The most-often talked about method of mobile fundraising and the one deployed by most mobile fundraising campaigns today are premium SMS campaigns (SMS refers to text messaging). Premium SMS fundraising campaigns were initially deployed to much publicity for disaster relief such as for Katrina victims and those of the California Wildfires. Customers of participating mobile carriers could send a text message to the short code “2HELP” (24357), activated during times of disasters, to make a tax-deductible donation of $5 to the American Red Cross’ relief efforts. 100% of thew donation benefiited the Red Cross as carriers wauved their fees. Now mobile fundraising shortcodes are available to all nonprofits, not just during the disasters.

Short codes are often referred to as the “mobile URL” — short, five digit codes or even vanity codes that customers can text to receive information or participate in a campaign. These donations via premium SMS then appear on customers’ monthly bills or are debited from prepaid cell phone account balances.

The Mobile Giving Foundation in the U.S. currently operates ten donation shortcodes and has enrolled over 65 nonprofits in its program. Each nonprofit has to go through an application process to qualify and then works with one of the mobile vendors that the Mobile Giving Foundation has approved, following strict guidelines.

Approval and then receiving the actual donations is not a quick process. Currently, there is a wait time of at least a month to get approved by the Foundation and the carriers. Donations solicited via mobile minus fees are collected and forwarded to the nonprofit within 90 days.

The size of mobile giving in the United States

Mobile giving via premium SMS is still small despite some valiant efforts. In 2008, the first full year of mobile fundraising in the United States, mobile giving crossed only half a million dollars. Not much, given the ubiquity of mobile phones in the US. But, as James Eberhard of Mobile Accord, a mobile vendor, points out, donations exceeded those raised on the Internet for the first year in 1997, when proceeds were a reported $300,000.

Eberhard cautions that “most nonprofit mobile campaigns are brand awareness campaigns right now rather than a direct response mechanism for an organization.” He points out that the current limit of $5 per SMS is too low an amount to yield much revenue. Nonprofits may furthermore fear that they cannibalize donors with a low mobile contribution when that same person could be giving more online.

But there is a growing number of campaigns — and lots of experimentation. For example, some of the more interesting campaigns used mobiles to draw attention to their brand, or used mobiles as part of a one-time holiday campaign. The Salvation Army in several cities, solicited mobile donations in its kettle ringing campaigns during the holidays. UNICEF deployed a similar strategy, soliciting donations via SMS during its Trick-or-treat for UNICEF campaign during Halloween. Both campaigns sought to capitalize on the just-in-time giving mobiles enable, though arguably it’s still much easier for donors to throw a few dollars into the kettle.

And then there are celebrity campaigns — Alicia Keys, most notably, who aggressively deployed and marketed mobile giving for her charity Keep a Child Alive. Keys included specific appeal for mobile donations during a concert tour last year and prominently displays a mobile giving short code for a $5 donation on the charity’s web site. According to Mobile Accord, the vendor for the campaign, 8,000 donors gave $5 via SMS during the concert tour, for a total of $40,000 for the charity.

These are still tiny numbers in comparison to the $10 billion in online donations purported to have been given online in 2007, and even smaller in comparison to the $300 billion in charitable giving overall.

But when taking into consideration the growth trends in mobile use and texting not just in the younger demographic but in the over-35 group, mobile giving via SMS is a channel nonprofits ought to at least consider. Mobile subscribers in the U.S. between 35 and 54, according to Nielsen, a rating firm, see especially explosive growth in SMS use: in 2007, just 37 percent of them regularly sent text-messages, while in 2008 that number grew to 59 percent. There are currently 270 million mobile subscribers in the US, according to industry group CTIA, all of which have the ability to send and receive text messages.

What works in mobile giving?

As the much-lauded Obama mobile campaign showed, mobile marketing is effective when deployed in a way that reinforces marketing messages through other channels and takes into consideration what is uniquely valuable about messaging via mobile phones. As good communication staff and fundraisers know, reinforcing messages that build a relationship with a donor, that are timely and urgent, and that have specific goals tend to be effective. Mobile messaging can play a role in well-thought-out campaigns and provides another, potentially very effective channel for reaching a target audience.

Share Our Strength, the national organization focused on child hunger, recently launched a text donation challenge — an effective way to reach new donors. Says Chuck Scofield, Share Our Strength’s VP for Development, “AT&T came to us as part of President Obama’s call to service.” Share our Strength and AT&T then partnered on a text-to-donate challenge: Donors who text in “SHARE” to 20222 on their mobile device for a $5 donation will be matched by AT&T for a total contribution up to $100,000. At the same time, as Scofield points out, Share our Strength also leads, together with AT&Ts employees a nationwide food drive to benefit community food banks in 32 cities. The food drive has so far generated 20,000 pounds of food alone, the mobile texting challenge is ongoing until March 1.

Share Our Strength did extensive outreach on blogger networks, and through Twitter. Says Suzy Twohig, Director of Donor Relations: “This is an opportunity for us to reach out to a new constituency. Our donors are giving more this year in response to the challenging times and for us, mobile giving is complementary to our other forms of giving.”

According to industry insiders, there may also be an inccrease in the premium SMS limit from $5 to $10 as well as SMS monthly recurring donations. At that $120-year price point, even if each SMS donation would have to be approved by the donor every month with a reply confirmation, mobile giving via SMS is beginning to look more lucrative for organizations than just a one-time $5 donation.

The hope is, according to Eberhard, that “if you can get a donor committed, even with a relatively small amount, it shows their involvement and can be tapped in the future.”

As usual in this field, there is little public data available, and most nonprofit campaigns have not been very strategic in converting their mobile donors or even activists into longer-term supporters, as we have often pointed out.

Eberhard also points out that most people do not know they can give via a text message, requiring still a large amount of donor education. He cautions that mobile revenue is not going to happen overnight for nonprofits but rightly notes that the trends are pointing in the right direction.

A new blog, Mobile Giving Insider, run by mobile vendor Mobile Commons, is keeping track of developments in this space, though it is currently only focused on premium SMS as a fundraising mechanism.

Going beyond SMS

But SMS is not the only way on which people can give. Mobile Commons, for example, has an application — mConnect — that is deployed by advocacy campaigns for legislative call-in campaigns. Planned Parenthood recently used the tool for a thank-you call to President Obama.

Here is how is works: An organization sends a text message including a phone number to its mobile list. The receiver replies CALL via text or simply dials the indicated number and is connected to a customized voice recording. This could be talking points or an overview of the situation — or a pitch to give. The caller is then forwarded on to a destination number, such as a legislative switchboard, or a phone bank.

Mobile Commons powered such a call-to-give for then-presidential candidate John Edwards who used his list of cellphone numbers to direct constituents via voicemail and text message to a live phone bank. Donors in this scenario then make a donation on the phone with a credit card rather than via a $5 text message.

Another tool, Twitter, has also been much in the news lately as a way for mobile peer-to-peer and micro-fundraising. Twitter, a microblogging service accessible via mobile phone or on the web, allows users to post 140-character messages to a list of followers. Nonprofits have been quick to take up Twitter as a way to get their messages out and converse with constituents. During a recent ‘tweetsgiving,’ an enterprising nonprofit raised $11K in just a few days through its network of supporters and peers to build a classroom in a Tanzanian school.

Twestival, an impromptu, all-volunteer-led series of events on the same day in the United States and the UK organized via Twitter raised a reported $250,000 for Charity: Water.

Share our Strength, through its outreach on Twitter for the mobile donation campaign, was mentioned on a prominent blog which resulted in a $1,000 matching grant from yet another reader, creating a ripple effect of attention and money. Says Scofield: “Our mobile campaign and outreach was opening the door for further engagement.

Though not strictly mobile giving, Twitter and other social networks such as Facebook are yet another channel for nonprofits to build networks reachable via mobile to turn people into supporters and donors of an organization.

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.

A few more examples

A nice example of mobile-inspired giving recently is the campaign by Stand Up for Kids, a nonprofit working to alleviate kid and teen homelessness. The organization teamed up with Virgin Mobile’s Generation RE campaign and American Eagle Outfitters. A user texts in “karma” to shortcode 68450 and a piece of clothing is donated to a homeless kid on the texter’s behalf by American Eagle. The donor can also text in his or her name to appear on the Stand Up for Kids website. The campaign did a number of things right: It was a great use of texting to team up with a company to make a donation on the donor’s behalf AND build a mobile list in the process. The medium is right for the group that is appealing to a younger audience that feels empathetic to teen homelessness. Even though the organization’s website clearly cries “poor nonprofit,” the Karma page is cool enough. Streaming the donor names makes people feel engaged and recognized.

Virgin has a text2donate program, too — you can give $5 to the nonprofit itself by texting “DONATE” to 7845, but it seems Stand Up for Kids is too humble to mention that anywhere on their site. So, if you read this, have a heart. Donate $5 by texting DONATE to 7845 to alleviate child and teen homelessness, and then give a kid some clothes from American Eagle by texting in “karma” to 68450 – which will cost you nothing but the cost of the SMS.

One of my perennial favorites, even though it is by now a few years old, is a campaign by Meir Panim, a network of soup kitchens in Israel. It ran an “SMS for Lunch” campaign, a promotional interactive campaign: On their website a boy was seen, facing an empty plate. The site invited you to donate through SMS. The moment the system received the SMS, the banner changed: the plate filled and the boy smiled. The amount of the donation — each SMS — covers the cost of one meal for a child.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s charity raised $85,000 with the cooperation of Zain, a South African mobile operator. Using Mandela’s 90th birthday last July as the ‘call to give’, well-wishers from around the world could text in a birthday wish and make a donation at the same time. Shared and dedicated premium SMS codes were set up in over 20 countries around the world including the U.S., U.K., South Africa, Australia, Spain and Germany as well as many African nations,making this one of the biggest premium SMS fundraising initiatives launched.

Photo courtesy Nelson Mandela Foundation

This entry originally appeared at MobileActive.org.

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