For many nonprofits, text messaging as a communications and fundraising tool can feel daunting. I’ve worked with nonprofits who grapple with understanding if text messaging is even right for them.

Below is a graphic shared with me by TextMagic that can help you better understand what an SMS campaign could look like and if it’s right for your nonprofit.

What do you think? Had your nonprofit worked on an SMS campaign? What were the results? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

The post How to Attract & Keep Donors Using Text Messaging 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.

Tie your mobile efforts to your email & social media outreach

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, NGOs, mobile advocacy groups, fundraising professionals, social media managers.

This is Part 7 of our series on social fundraising. See below for other articles in this series.

Guest post by Bob Jones
CEO, CharityCall

There is little argument that email and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming mandatory tools for supporter outreach. These communication channels provide nonprofit organizations with an immediate and effective way to solicit, cultivate and engage donor support.

From a pure fundraising standpoint, email and social media channels are only effective when the recipient is able to respond immediately to a call to action. At best, your call to action message is going to be read once, so if that message is compelling enough to cause the recipients to donate, then they must be able to do so immediately.

Today, when your targeted recipient reads your online call to action from their PC, the “donate” link to your website’s donation portal allows them to respond immediately with a gift. So the process of reaching out via email and social media to gain donations is fruitful – as long as the recipient is using a PC.

What happens if your target recipients are reading email and social media updates from their smartphone? Unfortunately, this is where your call to action for donations can hit a dead end, because the “donate” page linked from your current email or social media message may be inconvenient and nearly impossible to navigate and use from a mobile device. Expecting a smartphone user to enter full name, address and credit card number can be a non-starter.

So what can you do?

How to accept donations via the mobile Web

There are a few readily available methods that will allow you to start accepting donations via the mobile Web in association with email and social media outreach.

It’s important to remember that if you intend to appeal to the ever increasing mobile Web community of users, you will first need to include a convenient mobile donation platform as a fixture within your email and social media messaging.

Here are a few available solutions:

• Mobile-enable your online donation page: This will require help from your website development team or consultant. The process involves conversion of your current online donation page for viewing from a mobile device. This method basically reformats and converts the page content into a mobile experience. While the user will still need to input personal contact along with credit card info, the navigation will be more suited for mobile use.
• Custom mobile application (app): The mobile app market is brimming with development firms that can build a mobile application for your organization with the ability to accept donations from mobile Web users. The cost and time involved in this type of solution varies. It’s advisable to research and select a firm with good customer references. It’s also advisable to consider that “downloadable” apps for specific devices like iPhone, Android and Blackberry require separate development.
• Custom mobile Web app (site): The distinction between this type of “app” and a downloadable one that works with specific devices like iPhone and Android (noted above) is that it is accessible from any mobile device that uses a Web browser. It’s technically a “mobile website” that can be accessed using a specific URL address. These URLs can be included within email and social media call to actions to allow the donor to respond immediately simply by clicking on the link. If properly designed, it can work efficiently on any Web-enabled mobile device.

Examples of mobile Web apps

Here are a few examples of mobile Web apps:

m.childfund.org

This type of mobile Web app automates a Text2Give process to allow donors to donate a maximum of $10 via their wireless carrier.

gurgo.mobi

A PayPal mobile donation facility has been incorporated within this mobile site to allow donors to log-in and issue a donation in any amount or to pledge a donation for later completion from a PC.

m.komen.org

This final example illustrates a solution that has “mobile enabled” or formatted the organization’s online donation page. While the donor must still enter name, address and credit card account info they can do so in a more convenient fashion.

Since the adoption of Web-enabled smartphones has advanced at an astronomical rate, it’s important to accommodate this ever-expanding audience. It’s estimated that by the end of 2011, there will be 150 million smartphone users in the US. The fact is that “mobile” Web access is fast becoming the preference, even over online PC access. More importantly, smartphone users read email and social media updates from their mobile device more often than from their PC. Mobile donations are the next frontier.

Fundraising series on Socialbrite

• What social fundraising means for your nonprofit

• Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks

• Fundly: Tap into your supporters’ social networks

• GoodThreads: Custom T-shirts as a fundraising tool

• HelpAttack!: Unleash the charitable power of social media

• Rally: Raise money for your favorite cause

• Mobile: The next frontier of nonprofit fundraising

• 10 tips for a successful fundraising event

The post Mobile: The next frontier of nonprofit fundraising appeared first on Socialbrite.

We’ve just released a new report, Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmark Study, that offers the first-ever look at how organizations in the United States are using text messaging and how subscribers are responding. It shows that mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular as an advocacy and fund-raising tool by organizations, and it provides benchmarks and metrics by which nonprofit organizations can measure their success with text messaging.

Co-authored by myself and Michael Amoruso and Jessica Bosanko of M+R Strategic Services, the free report also illustrates the various ways in which organizations are using text messaging. The study was sponsored by Mobile Commons and mGive.

The earthquakes in Haiti earlier this year showed the power of SMS as a tool for fund-raising (raising millions in just a few days), and it’s now clear that there’s an opportunity for nonprofits to tap into the mobile market to engage their supporters. As the study reports, there are currently over 276 million wireless users in the U.S., and during the first half of 2009, users sent about 740 billion text messages. The report breaks down not only how nonprofits can use SMS to interact with supporters but also releases statistics on how specific organizations fared with their SMS campaigns.

You might be interested in learning:

• How nonprofits engage supporters through text messaging
• The advantages and limitations of text messaging as a tool for engagement
• How to evaluate the performance of a text message

6 nonprofits’ SMS campaigns profiled

The study gathered its data from profiling six organizations — American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Humane Society of the United States, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign — that ran SMS campaigns from August 2008 to August 2009.

Highlights include:

• For the organizations that participated in this study, over 80 percent of subscribers were existing supporters recruited from their online program.
• Lists grew at a rate of 49.5 percent annually.
• The annual churn rate for text lists was 30.7 percent. The benchmark text message unsubscribe rate was 0.69 percent.
• The response rate for call-in advocacy text messages was 4.7 percent – nearly six times the 2009 benchmark response rate of 0.82 for call-in advocacy emails.

The report also looked into the type of messages that the nonprofits were sending to their subscribers. The results fell into five categories: fund-raising, advocacy, informational, go-to-web and text reply. Learn more about the study at the Mobile Benchmarks website.

Related

• Free nonprofits & public interest reports (Socialbrite)

• How to set up an SMS campaign system

The post How are nonprofits using text messaging? appeared first on Socialbrite.