Mobile Giving through a Text to Donate Mobile Marketing Challenge

Text to Donate or Text-to-Give has been successfully utilized to raise funds by incorporating the program into a challenge to university students across Canada, in the NESTEA® “The Recruit Challenge”. The contest is loosely planned around the theme of the network show “The Apprentice”.

Paid Internship at Coca-Cola® for the Successful "Recruit"

The contest is to identify the successful NESTEA® Recruit, being a team of 3 university students out of 24 teams from universities across Canada, that compete in marketing challenges with the intent of surviving each elimination round. There are three teams per school and three challenges, starting in October 2010 and which wraps up in the spring of 2011. Each challenge is a hands-on experience designed to teach the students cross-disciplinary marketing skills including, concept creativity & development, experiential & promotional marketing, public relations, and social media marketing.  One team per school will be eliminated at the end of each challenge, being awarded an exit bonus based on their progress during the contest. The wining team will win one year’s tuition, up to $7,500, as well as a paid internship at Coca-Cola Ltd. or its partner agencies.

Challenge 1 saw the competing teams host a 24 hour Text-a-thon or activation to raise funds for Children’s Miracle Network utilizing the http://www.ZipGive.ca mobile giving service. By way of texting variants of the Keywords “KIDS 1-24” to shortcode 45678, the students were able to send text donations of $5.00 each to the Children’s Miracle Network. ZipGive.ca is an Authorized Service Provider of the Mobile Giving Foundation that in turn collects the donations from the cellular carriers and in turn remits them directly to the charity. 100% of the donation is passed through the cellular carriers to the charity, and for which the carriers’ magnanimous participation in full donation passthrough is very much appreciated by all concerned.

Text to Donate results in over $10,000 in Donations!

Results of Challenge 1 were quite substantial with over $10,000 being raised by all teams through Text to Donate. The winning team from the University of British Columbia raised $1,880.00 for BC Children’s Hospital through a “Be a Superhero” campus blitz with donations for pizza and NESTEA®.

This unique application of game theory to collecting mobile donations by NESTEA® has shown the impact that text-to-give can make as a fundraising tool. Mobile text-to-donate has previously shown its ability to substantially impact and support fundraising efforts: the 2010 Astral Media National Day of Caring for Kids Radiothon raised over $21,000 in one day for Children’s Miracle Network through Text Donations.

Mobile Giving Attracts A New Generation of Donors

Mobile Giving is a fit with a new generation of younger donors, where the university student demographics were consistent with high usage of mobile texting technologies. These demographics and their familiarity with and early adoption of mobile technologies are being more frequently addressed by charitable organizations as a means of increasing the scope of potential donors.

Additional Benefits of Mobile Marketing Opted-In List Development

Along with mobile giving is the ability for charities and non profit organizations to develop lists of opted-in donors, that through permission based marketing have agreed to have the charity or non-profit contact them in the future or on an ongoing basis. This mobile “relationship” can thereafter be mined much in the form of today’s social media marketing, until the mobile user opts out – the key difference between the mobile channel and social media is that mobile allows for immediate monetization of a donation call to action.

For more on the NESTEA® “The Recruit Challenge” please visit www.nestearecruit.com

ZipGive.ca is a mobile giving fundraising agency that has powered Text to Donate campaigns for many of Canada’s largest charities and non profit organizations and can be found at http://www. ZipGive.ca