Start with a strategy to expand your reach to potential supporters

Guest post by Cassie Bair and Jenifer Snyder

The U.S. is going mobile. Even as people increase their number of mobile devices, many nonprofits are still hesitant about adding mobile to their organization’s initiatives. Misconceptions such as which tools are available through mobile for data collection, engagement and fundraising cause nonprofits to incorrectly believe that mobile can be a lot of work with little return.

The fact is, mobile is no longer just an exciting new addition to fundraising or engagement, but a tool that supporters expect you to have. The data around mobile proves it is a worthwhile venture for many nonprofits – beyond times of disaster. More than 20 percent of a typical organization’s web traffic comes from a mobile device. (Do you know your number?) Those users are generally more engaged online, through SMS, and donate via text as well as in other ways.

Before the thought of adding yet another piece to your fundraising puzzle becomes too daunting, here are a few important points about mobile from the mGive Foundation.

Mobile brings the world right to your donor

1You become a part of your donors’ world. Mobile phones are the centralizing point for many people’s day-to-day activities including social media, photo sharing, email, phone calls and text. People determine what information they want to receive via mobile – and how – and because of this, are very likely to stay engaged with a cause to take action when prompted. The power of how that technology can be used to benefit your nonprofit is truly just starting to evolve.

In order to reach the potential supporters you have at your fingertips, you need to have a fully integrated strategy – and mobile tools that can effectively do the job. Mobile technology is evolving, empowering supporters to cross communication channels and ultimately bring offline experiences online. With the power to post to social media from a text message or link to the mobile web from an email, to a multitude of other options—mobile is expanding the reach you have with both prospective and current supporters at all times.

Engage your next live audience through mobile

2Capture donor information and then add the info to your database. Asking people to fill out a form or to take an online poll still works in the traditional sense, but what if you could capture the information via mobile? Even better, what if you could collect the data shared in the heat of the moment vs. only when someone is online? Then use that data to drive awareness, giving and more when you combine it with information you already have about your supporters?

Organizations can use mobile to conduct polls, receive live feedback at events, track open rates of text campaigns, generate ROI for social media through giving apps and social sharing options, plus so much more.

In addition, nonprofits can gain a broader and deeper understanding of their supporters when combining mobile behaviors with more traditional information probably already housed in your CRM system.

Mobile is a pivot point for influencing supporter behavior

3The mobile device is a hub of activity for many people in the U.S. If your supporters own a mobile phone, they likely have a smartphone or will soon. Most probably use it for text, to visit websites, to post to social media sites, to email, to share photos and videos – and occasionally actually use it for phone calls.

If you could determine what supporters are doing, how they are doing it, when they are doing it and then ask for them to take action through mobile, you may be surprised at the results. So collect what you can, when you can about mobile behavior to run more robust reports and drive additional engagement.

It’s easy to find out how much a mobile donor likes you

4Mobile engagement creates a more personal relationship between you and your donor, but it’s also a relationship that you can measure. When your organization sends out a mobile call-to-action, the feedback you receive is more immediate and complete, allowing you to tailor your fundraising strategy for better results. By measuring opt-ins, click through to links, donations, and even opt-out numbers, you can more closely monitor the temperature of your donor pool, to create tactics that resonate.

Capitalizing on this mobile revolution is not just about increasing mobile databases or building more robust donor profiles, it’s about finding better ways to change the world. It has never been easier for donors to help those in need with just a few clicks on their mobile phone. Mobile allows everyone to become an everyday philanthropist and for your organization to benefit from the results.

Not sure where to get started with a mobile strategy? First, start by changing every form (online and offline) to capture a mobile number. Chances are, that’s the information you are collecting anyway but you may not have it labeled correctly in your system. If your data is only as good as what you put into your system, you sure want to make sure you are putting it in correctly!

Once you start collecting mobile data, start reviewing the profiles of donors and supporters with mobile numbers flagged in your system. You may be surprised at the trends around age ranges, giving rates, volunteer hours and more. That valuable information will guide you down the path of an effective mobile strategy for your organization.

The post How nonprofits should capitalize on the mobile revolution appeared first on Socialbrite.

Why mobile matters for nonprofit fundraising

Guest post by Claire Kerr
Director of Digital Philanthropy, Artez Interactive

If you’re one of the 84% of people worldwide who claim they “couldn’t go a day” without a mobile phone in hand, you are clearly not alone! We’ve never been more passionate users of mobile devices than we are right now.

At my company, Artez Interactive, we clearly can see the rising importance of smartphones and tablets by looking at the traffic to fundraising and donation pages on our North American platform. Of the millions of unique visitors to our system every month, over 15% are visiting on mobile devices.

As we increasingly adopt mobile devices in our professional and personal lives, we are also turning to mobile technology to help us support charitable causes.

We wanted to know more about the impact of mobile devices on peer-to-peer, or “crowd-sourced,” fundraising campaigns. When individuals are motivated to ask their friends and social networks to donate to a cause, are those supporters using smartphones and tablets to help them fundraise? Similarly, are donors in peer-driven events giving through mobile-web enabled devices?

We examined the fundraising success of 83,566 participants in a variety of peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns to help answer that question for our Mobile Matters Whitepaper.

Some of the individuals in this study were participating in traditional run, walk, or cycle-a-thon events. Others were encouraged to host a party for a cause or raise pledges toward the completion of a challenging activity. All participants were asked to sign up on a charitable organization’s website and collect donations on a personal fundraising page towards their fundraising goal.

Registrants had the choice of any of the following digital fundraising tools to help them raise money:

• Event website: Participants on laptops and computers had the option to log into the campaign’s website to send solicitation emails, post on social media sites, upload photos and personal messages, and track donations through an online fundraising console.
• Mobile website: Participants on mobile devices automatically experienced a mobileversion of the campaign website, allowing them to log into the site and raise money through a mobile-optimized version of the fundraising console.
• Mobile app: Participants with an Android or iOS device could download the event’s free mobile application (“app”) from Google Play or the iTunes store. The app allowed participants to log into a version of the campaign’s fundraising console, access their device’s contact list for email, post to social sites, and upload photos taken from their smartphones.

Given these options, we discovered that 23% of all participants chose to log into the mobile web site, download and log into the mobile app, or use both mobile options. (The highest percentage of “mobile fundraisers” we saw in any individual campaign was 37%.) That means that overall, almost one in four registrants used mobile tools to fundraise for their cause.

Mobile fundraisers and fundraising success

In each campaign we examined, mobile fundraisers raised more money than those who used the web only.

Participants who chose to use one mobile tool (mobile web or mobile app) raised 2.2 times more money than non-mobile participants. Individuals who used both mobile web and a mobile app were even more successful, raising 2.95 times more than non-mobile participants. These “heaviest mobile users” represented some of the most successful fundraisers in each campaign.

Do mobile fundraisers simply have wealthier friends? No!

Mobile fundraisers raised more individual pledges from friends and family than non-mobile fundraisers. The online-only group of participants averaged 5.1 individual donations. When participants used one mobile tool, either web or app, they earned an average 8.4 individual donations. Participants who used both mobile web and mobile apps earned even more, on average 11.4 individual donations.

Could mobile fundraisers be more successful at earning more pledges because they are making more asks for donations to friends and family members? When we surveyed participants to see which features of apps they were using the most, the most popular answer was: “make ‘asks’ for donations via email, Facebook and Twitter.”

Why are mobile fundraisers more successful at raising money?

It’s possible that mobile tools themselves help participants raise more money, encouraging them to check their messages and fundraising totals on-the-go, or make more individual requests for donations.

It’s also possible that a campaign’s most engaged, most enthusiastic, and best performing fundraisers are also big fans of smartphones and tablets. Most event fundraising professionals are well aware of the “80/20 Rule” proposing that, in general, 80% of donations will be generated by 20% of the most active participants.

Either scenario suggests it’s important for fundraising campaigns to provide mobile technology options for participants.

Donors and mobile devices

Participant success is only one piece of the mobile picture. Many people think of “mobile donations” as meaning gifts by text-to-donate (SMS). However, with the shift toward mobile web and responsive design, it’s now easier for donors on smartphones and tablets to give by credit card or PayPal directly through a charity’s mobile-optimized donation form.

With mobile traffic to charity and nonprofit pages hovering at 15%, we wondered about the donors in these peer-driven campaigns. Are donors giving on mobile devices?

When we dove into the pool of over 250,000 individual donations, we found that, yes, donors are making pledges on mobile web browsers. A little over 6.5% of the donations were made through a smartphone or tablet browser. To put this number in perspective, only 12 months ago the average number of mobile web donations in a campaign was 2.15%. That’s an incredible increase of 205% in the last year. (Which begs the question — what will the percentage of donations by mobile web browsers be by the end of 2013?)

What’s driving the rapid rise of mobile web donations?

The fact that almost 50% of Americans now own smartphones is just the beginning of the explanation. We also know that the majority of tweets are read on a mobile device and that users of mobile Facebook are twice as active on Facebook as those on computers.

When event participants share fundraising page links on social sites, it’s more likely than ever before that their potential sponsors may view that post or tweet through a mobile device. Our Fundraising with Facebook Whitepaper review of 645,000 individual donations in peer-driven events found that over 15% of those pledges were directly referred from Facebook.

Email is another platform driving donors to pledge by mobile web. Adobe’s 2013 Digital Publishing Report noted that 79% of smartphone owners use their device for reading email. In fact, that’s a higher percentage than those who use it for making phone calls!

We know that donors are motivated to give after reading personal emails from a friend or family member. When fundraising participants send emails to friends asking for donations, there’s a good chance their requests could be read on a smartphone or tablet.

It’s refreshing that the conversation about mobile technology in the non-profit sector has evolved beyond text-to-donate to include mobile design and apps as other important elements of an integrated fundraising campaign. Have these insights piqued your curiosity?

The post The impact of mobile on peer-to-peer fundraising appeared first on Socialbrite.

Use the power of the social Web to make an impact

The earthquake that shook Haiti last week demolished and devastated the entire nation. Looking at pictures online, reading testimonials of survivors and following the developments in the rescue and emergency response teams, I felt, like many of you, overwhelming sadness. Mere weeks after completing my Kiva Fellowship last summer, the Philippines were hit with Typhoon Ondoy, another natural disaster resulting in true devastation.

I was looking back on pictures from the Philippines and wanted to share the slideshow above from when I went to visit Bernardita Dayo, a Kiva borrower that I had actually funded before I became a Fellow. Looking at those pictures, their homes located so close to the water, I’m reminded that for every picture we see of Haiti NOW, just last week there were other pictures showing THEN.

The pictures above, that village, doesn’t exist in the same way after the Typhoon, now it is just a memory as the Filipino people work to rebuild their villages and homes so too now does Haiti have a long and turbulent road ahead of them. The “then” in their pictures were vibrant lives and villages with personality, history and culture whose path has now forever been changed.

When you give to help Haiti, and you should, $5-$10 is little to most of us but means the world to them, I’d like to ask you to remember that you’re giving not just to help the Haitian people out of their dire current situation, but investing in their future and the rebuilding of the parts of their society and community that helped define them.

Here are a few quick and easy ways from WhatGives!:

• Text HAITI to 90999. $10 will be charged to your cell phone bill and given to the American Red Cross.

• Text YELE to 501501. $5 will be charged to your cell phone bill and given to Yele Haiti. (see note at end of post about Yele Haiti)

• Text CERF to 90999. $5 will be charged to your cell phone bill and given to the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund.

• Text HAITI to 45678. $5 will be charged to your cell phone bill and given to The Salvation Army.

• Text QUAKE to 20222. $10 will be charged to your cell phone bill and given to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

• Text SAVE to 20222 (US Only). $10 will be charged to your cell phone bill and given to Save the Children.

Other ways to make a difference

In addition to the above, I’ve also made a donation to Architecture for Humanity and I’d like to ask you to join me. Cameron Sinclair wrote a powerful article in the HuffPost about the rebuilding of Haiti:

When we are rebuilding, do not let the media set the time line and expectations for reconstruction. I remember vividly well known news personalities standing on the rubble of homes in the lower ninth proclaiming that ‘this time next year we will see families back home.’ Some well meaning NGOs, who usually have little building experience, are even worse — ‘we’ll have 25,000 Haitians back home if you donate today.’ In reality, here is what it really looks like;

• Pre-Planning Assessments and Damage Analysis (underway, will run for a year)
• Establish Community Resource Center and Reconstruction Studio (Week 6 to Month 3)
• Sorting Out Land Tenure and Building Ownership (Month 6 to Year 5)
• Transitional Shelters, Health Clinics and Community Structures (Month 6 to Year 2)
• Schools, Hospitals and Civic Structures (Month 9 to Year 3)
• Permanent Housing (Year 1 to Year 5)

Thank you to WhatGives! for creating the widget below that makes it easy for you to make a donation in just a few clicks.

The social web has incredible power to impact change on the world and when disaster strikes, we must dig into our pockets, past where we already give and help those in need. Because we’d want the world to act the same if something horrific were to happen in our backyard. A lesson I’ve learned all too well from the amazing people here in New Orleans.

Please text or make a donation to help the rebuilding of Haiti today.

If you liked this post, you might like:

• Simple Ways To Make A Difference Today
• $5 or 5 minutes, 1 Way to Make A Difference Today
• Be A Part of Tweetsgiving

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