WASHINGTON – Mobile giving initiatives do not cannibalize other fundraising channels such as online and direct mail, according to a panel at Nonprofit Mobile Day.

Cohosted by Mobile Marketer and the Direct Marketing Association, the conference offered best-practice tips and case studies related to mobile giving. The “Mobile Giving, Mobile Marketing or Both?” panel was moderated by John Styers, Kansas City, MO-based vice president of corporate strategy and industry relations at 3Cinteractive.

“Mobile giving does not jeopardize other forms of giving,” said Christian Zimmern, vice president of the Mobile Giving Foundation, Washington. “People who donate via mobile are different from people who donate via online or traditional channels—mobile donors have a unique profile.”

New Ways to Fundraise: Importance of Mobile & Web Presence

ZipGive offers new ways to fundraise - both small and large non profit organizations can implement text message and social media originated fundraising to increase donations. We live in a fast paced society that expects results quickly. Today’s society looks to their social networks and mobile devices to get information in real time. It is therefore crucial that your non-profit organization has a presence in both mobile and social network worlds, and the means to monetize this presence.

One way to integrate mobile fundraising is to utilize ZipGive’s FaceBook widget that permits social network members to initiate a text to donate transaction right from their FaceBook page. The Facebook widget is available to charities that sign up with ZipGive and can be easily rolled out through a charity’s fan page – it’s a great way to extend microdonations into the realm of social networks.

Another way to fundraise by mobile is to use the ZipGive web widget that can be easily incorporated into a charity’s website and that lets visitors initiate a Text-to-Donate transaction right from the desktop. This fundraising method similarly takes advantage of an “in the moment” response to a call to action to encourage a micro-donation that otherwise may not have been made.

To successfully use ZipGive’s social network and website widgets you must always have a clear call to action on your website. Don’t assume prospective donors know what to do.

Text Message Campaign :Sometimes Smaller is Better than Larger!

A Text message campaign centers around "microdonations". A microdonation through texting is in the amount of $5 or $10 per donation, although multiple donations can be made at any one time to a maximum of $30 per month based on a person’s cellphone number. Essential benefits of a microdonation campaign are threefold, where the aggregate of donations can be quite large and equal to traditional campaigns for the same time, effort and investment.

First, a microdonaton text message campaign allows for an immediate response to a call to action. Similar to the pavlovian bell ringing response, a heartfelt outreach especially when done by a well known personality, can have incredible motivating effects to act in the moment. Any delay between receipt of a call to action, such as on television or in print, expectedly results in a drop off of intended donorship. Minimization of this latency by empowering cellphone users to be able to donate from the device that’s with them 24/7, is the means of eliminating or reducing such donor delay fallout.

Second, there is an incredible body of wired and networked populace that has yet to donate, for a number of reasons:

1. They cannot be reached by print media.
2. The cannot be reached by television.
3. They have no credit cards for donations.

What this means is that there is an incredible opportunity to encourage a microdonation in order to commence a relationship with this demographic. Remember they do not yet have any specific charitable allegiances. The beauty of a text message campaign is that the donor's mobile telephone number is gathered, which is subject to privacy limitations, may prospectively be utilized for both further donations as well as to maintain and develop a future relationship. Perhaps the latter aspect of relationship building is most important from the perspective of bringing in new donors into the donor lifecycle funnel, where once acquired the value of that donor over their lifetime is potentially geometrically that of their initial microdonation.

Finally, the text message campaign is electronic – no more spending a disproporationate time and expense to access mass small donors. The 80/20 rule has been turned on its ear with mobile donations. For a small upfront fee and percent of donations collected, scalabilty is infinite where the ability to collect 100 through a 100,000 donations is the same. Text message campaigns offer ecomonies of scale previously unheard of.

So this is how in today’s digital age smaller can be better than larger , using a text message campaign for the right reasons with an eye to what this tip of the iceberg disruptive technology, offers charities and not for profits, immediate and future returns. Set up a text message campaign with ZipGive today.

Mobile Giving is Growing!

Think about how Mobile Giving can help you get millions of people, together quickly and motivate them to contribute to a single cause? If the Haiti earthquake, the Pakistani floods and Gulf oil cleanup are any indication, launch a call to action which can be actualized by the device that most people now have with them 24/7, their cell phone. The link between a call to action and taking action is now rendered almost instantaneous by way of the ability to make text donations through the cellphone. Donations are collected by the cellular carriers and remitted directly to the charity or non-profit completing the process of mobile giving.

Acceptance of using the cellphone for what is, at its most basic, a monetary transaction, was slow to develop, until the watershed of Haiti. Haiti changed the landscape of mobile giving, expectedly because of the urgency and the almost all pervasive media coverage that mobilized pretty much everyone with a heart to do something. Those that couldn’t go, gave. Those that couldn’t give in large amounts, were offered for the very first time the ability to make a micro mobile donation – just as effective in the aggregate, but incredibly useful on a personal level – the opening of the electronic wallet by mobile giving companies was easy since it came in biteable chunks of $5 or $10.

This recognition of the cellphone as no longer a communications medium, but a lifestyle device that interconnects a person’s contacts, music, news, and increasingly finances with mobile banking, realizes the vision of the mobile device as a medium of commerce. Enabling this transition from handover economics of opening one’s physical wallet or pocketbook, is a preconditioning born of internet commerce for which online credit card transaction are now commonplace, where only 4-5 years ago such were regarded with a pervasive scepticism.

As the Bedouins say, once the nose of the camel has opened the tent the body is bound to follow – so are the incursions into validating the mobile device as an instrument of commerce through mobile giving, undoubtedly leading to transactions of greater size and scope being conducted by the lowly cellphone. The key difference from prior incursions is that the cellphone carries with it a unique identifier in the associated telephone number, which the device owner is unlikely to change when changes to devices, carriers or plans are made … and this telephone number is recorded upon initiation of the mobile giving transaction. Subject to applicable privacy policies and related limitations, the benefiting charity of the mobile donation now has a direct means to recontact the donor.

It’s this ongoing conversation capability, as the precursor to establishing a lasting relationship, why mobile giving will continue to grow. Coupled with existing mobile CRM technologies that permit send to friend functionality, this touchpoint of a donor’s telephone number has the potential for a viral explosion of mobile giving, the next time there’s a call to action.

Charities and non-profits can’t lag behind utilizing mobile giving as their competition for the charitable donation or dollar will be developing the relationships made possible by starting with mobile giving, and once developed any existing relationship is hard to displace. The time for mobile giving is now – charities and non-profits should grow with it!