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!

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Outtakes from Mobile World Congress & a community engagement event

Last week saw me start out at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and finish up at an event focusing on the use of text messaging in the nonprofit sector in London.

It was a busy week but two new resources were the end result.

Pictures. If you didn’t make it to Mobile World Congress then here’s a Flickr set of 111 free-to-use photos to give you a flavour of the event. Mobile World Congress is the world’s largest mobile exhibition and conference and features CEOs and representatives from mobile operators, device manufacturers, technology providers, vendors and content owners from around the world.

Words. Last Friday, Credemus Associates ran an event in London attended by representatives from FrontlineSMS and Text to Change. “The World in the Palm of Your Hands: SMS & Mobile Communications” was the first in a new line of events which Credemus hopes will become a live platform for discussion and news on ICT to support community engagement for Local Authorities, Third Sector and Public Sector organisations. At Friday’s event, FrontlineSMS and Text to Change announced the release of a new resource on how to use SMS as an effective behaviour change campaigning tool:

Behaviour change campaigning is inherently interactive. In order to encourage positive behaviour change, it is important to not only push campaign messages out to people, but to listen to the responses. To run a campaign that has a real impact, you need to listen to ensure you’re being heard. This is one of the main reasons why SMS – as a widely accessible and inherently interactive communications channel – is an ideal tool for campaigning.

You can read the FrontlineSMS blog post announcing the resource here, or download it here (PDF, 700Kb).

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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

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This week I heard about Drew Olanoff’s latest fundraising campaign, a text-to-give strategy on behalf of Boarding for Breast Cancer. Here’s how it works:

Every time someone texts “tp4bc” to 60611, the textPlus mobile address, textPlus will donate $1 to Boarding for Breast Cancer, a non-profit, youth-focused education, awareness, and fundraising foundation whose mission is to increase awareness about breast cancer, the importance of early detection and the value of an active lifestyle.

textPlus, a mobile app, offers users free texting with group text capability.  What’s cool is that Drew’s employer GOGII is the mobile app developer behind textPlus, a free group texting application available on the iPhone and Android platforms.

This is not the first time Drew Olanoff has taken to the social web to fundraise for cancer. Last May, after Drew was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, he launched a charity called blamedrewscancer.com, which donated $1 to the LIVESTRONG foundation for every person who followed @DrewFromTV, the Twitter handle of comedian Drew Carey. The charity has raised $15,000 to date and is a great example of personal fundraising that leverages the power of social media.

If you’re looking for information about to design and implement an effective SMS campaign, Allyson Kapin has a post that includes tips, as well as a description of some of the challenges.  Her tips include:

If your nonprofit is thinking of launching a mobile fundraising campaign, it’s critical that you develop a multi-channel marketing and outreach plan to spread the word and maximize donations. For example:

• Start with emailing your online activists and donors and place your shortcode and keyword front and center. Include a “Forward to a Friend” link and a “Share This” app on the landing page so people can promote it to social networks too. Reinforce this in a follow up thank you email as well.

• Leverage social networks. Tweet the “text to donate” campaign. Ask followers to pass it on. Post it to your Facebook Fanpage and any other social networks your organization is active on. Report back on key milestones. The American Red Cross has done a terrific job in the last 72 hours of reporting how much money they are raising via mobile, the work they are doing on the ground, etc.

• Paid advertising such as banner ads, keywords and text ads are excellent and fast ways to promote your campaign to millions of people and grow your list at the same time.

• Follow up with your donors. Tell them about the progress you have made towards reaching your fundraising goals. Explain how their money is being spent. Share some personal stories by people who have been impacted by their donations.

Has your organization incorporated text-to-give in its fundraising bag of tricks? What have you learned about implementing these campaigns? What are the best specific blog posts and resources out there on SMS fundraising?

Cross-posted from Beth’s Blog.

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Two organisations I’ve had the pleasure of working with – Tactical Tech and Fahamu – have independently announced the release of a film and a book that cover different aspects of non-profit digital activism. Both are well worth a look.

Info-activism.org, a Tactical Tech initiative, explores how rights advocates “use information and digital technology to create positive change.” Actions are broken down into 10 tactics that, through the site, provide original and artful ways for rights advocates to capture attention and communicate a cause (see video, above). The website includes a 50-minute film documenting inspiring info-activism stories from around the world and a set of cards, with tools tips and advice to help people plan their own info-activism campaigns. Further details of the launch are available on the BBC News website.

Turning to more traditional media, Fahamu/Pambazuka have published a new book, SMS Uprising: Mobile Phone Activism in Africa, which provides “a unique insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa’s many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technologies to facilitate these changes.”

The book is essentially a collection of essays by people engaged in using mobile phone technologies for social change, and it provides an analysis of the socioeconomic, political and media contexts faced by activists in Africa today. The essays address a broad range of issues including inequalities in access to technology based on gender, rural and urban usage, as well as offering practical examples of how activists are using mobile technology to organise and document their experiences. Contributors include friends Sokari Ekine (Blacklooks) – also the editor – Amanda Atwood (Kubatana.net), Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi), Christian Kreutz (Crisscrossed.net) and others.

Congratulations to everyone at Tactical Tech and Fahamu on their initiatives, both of which provide valuable contributions to a growing body of literature on digital activism. Thanks also for the invitations to contribute – an honour and a pleasure!

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Sensing is just one way in which mobiles are used in environmental protection. Another promising area is wildlife protection in sensitive areas where humans and animals collide, often to the detriment of protected animals.

In the Laikipia District in Kenya, the University of Cambridge conducted a project using mobile phones to protect and manage Kenya’s second largest elephant population, and the ecosystem they inhabit.  The goal was to alleviate human-elephant conflict between local farmers and the protected elephants.  The project used mobile phones for early warning of elephants approaching farmland by using ‘push-to-talk’ technologies, and GPS/GSM collars for the elephants, allowing wildlife personnel to intervene before elephant became a danger to farmers and vice versa.

Mobiles are especially useful for gathering and acting on just-in-time information. Imagine this scenario: A woman in Johannesburg, South Africa, stands at the fish counter in her local supermarket and texts the name of a fish to a phone number. Within seconds, she receives back information via a short text message informing her whether the fish is legally and environmentally harvested and advising her whether “to tuck in, think twice or avoid completely.”

The consumer is using FishMS, a text service of Sassi (The Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative) and the World Wildlife Fund to help consumers make informed choices about the seafood they purchase.

Sassi has taken this system into a mobile environment — just in time environmental information in the super market. Jaco Barendse, coordinator of SASSI, says that cell phones are “the ideal way to combine technology and information with the variety of seafood available and the growing awareness among seafood lovers, chefs, food buyers and so on that the ocean’s resources aren’t infinite. It also “demonstrates to retailers and restaurateurs that those consumers are willing to use their spending power. When shoppers and restaurant patrons start texting to check whether the ‘Catch of the Day’ is okay to eat, it’ll hopefully help drive suppliers buying habits.”

Text message information services

FishMS is one of a growing number of environmental text message information services available to consumers and citizens that provide just-in-time information about the toxicity of products, ambient air quality, or the environmental impact of products and companies.

Blue Ocean’s FishPhone does the same in the United States and has been a ‘runaway’ SMS success.  US customers can try it out by texting the words “fish” and then the name of the species you are wondering about — say “tuna” — to 30644. And watch for the new Sushi Guide put together by Blue Ocean, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Consumer information on the mobile is also the idea of GoodGuide, a new start-up spun out of the University of California at Berkeley. Good Guide provides ‘green’ consumer information for shoppers who want to buy products in line with their values.

The tens of thousands of products are organized into categories such as health, social and environmental impact. Currently, there are four product types: personal care, household chemicals, food, and toys. Electronics and and apparel are to be added over the next several months.

“I think there’s a burgeoning awareness that there is a global supply chain behind a product,” Dara O’Rourke told Wired.com in an article. “People are seeing that there are real costs to these everyday low prices. The question is, can we deliver this information in a way that is simple and easy and helps people make decisions?”

O’Rourke spent years compiling a database of the ‘greenness” of products, drawing on more than 650 data sources to create product metrics. This has been a major barrier of many of these consumer guides accessible by mobile as assembling the data points is expensive and time-consuming to do.

Consumers will be able to receive text messages about products based on the product UPC code. Good Guide also developed an iPhone app that allows you to create your ‘good guide’ shopping list, and most excitingly, GoodGuide has an open API that exposes the site’s data for other applications and organizations that want to use it.

Research has shown that consumers respond best to ‘action asks,’ that is, buy or no-buy recommendations that show a consumer in very simple terms what to do in the grocery aisle. We are excited to see how successful scores are in changing consumer behavior.

And then there is, of course, the straight-forward environmental activism.  Greenpeace Argentina, for example, has an urgent alert network of 100,000 ‘movile activistas’ who can be contacted by the push of the ‘send’ button via text message during legislative action campaigns.  The organization is the premier environmental advocacy outfit in Argentine and, thanks to instant alerts and smart campaigning, using the web and text messages, was able to pass the first forest protection law in the country in 2008.

These are exciting times where mobiles can become an integral part in our environmental lives, helping to make data and information accessible, and change the way we shop, consume, and advocate. Of course, mobile phones are also a source of environmental waste – so-called m-waste – that often ends up in developing countries.  So, to come full circle, please make sure you recycle that phone when you upgrade at a reputable recycling facility.

This entry originally appeared at MobileActive.org.

Related

• A user’s guide to mobile activism

• 20 tips for mobile advocacy

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Although there are still very real literacy issues for SMS-based social mobile projects, at least allowing messages to be sent and received in the local language – assuming handset support is available – removes at least one more barrier. We’re excited to see how much this ends up being used, and what further opportunities it opens up for FrontlineSMS users around the world.

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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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