Giving in a digital world

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Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

The fast growing potential for Smartphone Fundraising

Posted by Bryan on July 12, 2010

Last week, Ericsson analysts announced that, according to their estimates, the world’s 5 billionth mobile phone subscription was reached on Thursday July 8th, and they illustrated the pace of growth with the fact that there are now more mobile subscribers in China alone than there were globally in 2000.

While such a milestone is a clear reminder of the growing ubiquity of mobile phones, it’s actually the parallel growth in mobile broadband subscriptions that Ericsson also report in the same news release that I think is all the more exciting from the fundraising point of view. They forecast 3.4 billion mobile broadband subscribers by 2015, up from 360 million in 2009 – which is in-line with other market estimates and represents the level of growth that has led analysts at Gartner Research to announce earlier this year that mobile phones will actually overtake PCs as the most common web access device world-wide by 2013.

This might seem like a crazy forecast, given the relatively low levels of mobile web use we see today. But with multiple studies showing month on month exponential growth in mobile web user numbers and eMarketer analysts predicting that there will be more mobile internet users in China by the end of this year than the entire population of the US it’s already looking like the technology adoption curve to beat them all.

All of which is why, when I was asked to present the Hot Topic: Digital Fundraising session at the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention here in London last week it was Smartphones and the incredible range of new fundraising opportunities their mass adoption looks set to offer us that I took as my hot topic subject.

You can see my full presentation above or view it on Slideshare here – and if you’d like to read more about some of the emerging new fundraising opportunities then you can also take a look at my article in the April edition of the Resource Alliance’s ‘Global Connections’ e-newsletter.

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Posted in Mobile, Online Consumer Insight, Online fundraising, Smartphone Fundraising | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Square brings credit card fundraising to a smartphone near you (if you’re US-based)

Posted by Bryan on May 16, 2010

A couple of months back I heard about the trials of a great smartphone-based service called Square that allows anyone with an iPhone or Android smartphone to take credit card payments – or donations – simply by registering, downloading an application, and plugging a little square card reader into their phone’s headphone jack. At that time, as I mentioned in an article on Smartphone Fundraising, a beta version of the service had been tested for fundraising at events by Charity:Water and also by Reshma Saujani, a democratic congressional candidate for New York’s 14th District whose fundraisers were using it for door-to-door fundraising – and it struck me what a fantastic service this could be for any fundraiser looking to raise donations at events.

Essentially, a Smartphone version of the traditional charity collection tin – for credit cards!

The great news is that the trials seem to have gone really well, and Square is now available for anyone who wants to take credit card payments – and has an iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or Android Phone.

The bad news is that it’s only available in the US, with no current plans to bring the service to Europe. Although the question is being asked quite a bit on the @Square Twitter feed – so here’s hoping they do expand it sometime soon.

For a full write-up on the service, have a read of the coverage in the latest issue of Fast Company – or take a look at the Square site at squareup.com.

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Posted in Fundraising, Mobile, Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

New digital tracking study reveals UK consumer views on promotional email and social media use

Posted by Bryan on May 16, 2010

Last Thursday I was out at the launch event for the DMA’s Digital Tracker Study, a research initiative (backed by online research company FastMAP and email marketing company SilverPop) that aims to provide regular insights into some of the key questions online marketers are asking in relation to using email and social media use.

I’ve embedded a copy of the main research presentation above, so you can take a look at the top-line findings (or click here to view on SlideShare).

As is always the case with such research, some of the observations just confirm what most good online marketers know already – like the fact that traditional sales promotion techniques (money off or free delivery) work well in email.  But I did find some of the insights related to people’s use of Spam flags and also the difference between use of mobile devices to access emails and social media sites of real interest. Plus, there are also some great headline stats – like almost two thirds of recipients finding less than one in ten promotional emails of interest (which might explain some of the dismal click through rates many email marketers see).

Here are some of the insights that jumped out at me – but do take a look yourself and see if the results confirm or counter your own experience or current thinking:

  • 43% of UK adults receive over 20 promotional emails a week – so there’s lots of competition for attention in their inbox
  • 64% of people find just 1 in ten (or less) of these emails of interest to them – suggesting that if you can be truly relevant than you can really stand-out
  • 19% of people will flag your email as Spam if they feel they receive too many and 18% will Spam flag emails they don’t recall signing-up for- so make sure you send a memorable ‘welcome’ email in response to every sign-up and then watch your frequency if you don’t want your email campaigns blacklisted (although the more relevant and thus ‘valuable’ your email, the less frequency should be a concern)
  • A further 8% use the Spam flag instead of opting-out if the opt-out process seems too slow or unclear – so, again you’re risking blacklisting if you don’t make it as easy to opt-out as you did to opt-in
  • The majority of email is still read on desktop (67%) or laptop (49%) devices – but 11% of adults now also read them on mobile devices
  • Interestingly, this contrasts with 18% of people using mobile devices to access their social networks – suggesting a very different mode of use between email and social networks, which marketers need to take into account

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Posted in Email, Mobile, Online Consumer Insight, Online fundraising, Online retail, Social networking | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Getting excited about smartphone mobile fundraising

Posted by Bryan on April 25, 2010

Back in October last year when I was over in Holland giving an online fundraising session at the International Fundraising Congress (IFC), I was asked to give a short comment to camera on what I was most excited about in terms of the future of digital fundraising.

At that time, I’d just started to research new ways for fundraisers to make use of the incredibly rich functionality becoming available on the latest generation of ‘smart’ mobile phones, so that’s what I chose to chat about. You can see the result in the video above, this being the first of 30 such short videos being used by The Resource Alliance to promote the 2010 IFC.

For a rather more detailed introduction to the sort of new things fundraisers may be able to do as smartphone adoption continues to grow, I’ve also just written an article for the April edition of the Resource Alliance’s ‘Global Connections’ e-newsletter. Entitled ‘The emerging opportunities for smart fundraisers to use smartphones’, you can read the full article here.

This is a fascinating new area for digital fundraising, so you can be sure that I’ll be posting more about it over the coming months as well as talking about some of the latest examples at the UK Institute of Fundraising National Convention in July.

Meantime, if you are working on any smartphone fundraising yourself, do let me know by leaving a comment below or sending me a message through the ‘Hello and Welcome’ page.

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Posted in Fundraising, Mobile, Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

NSPCC offers virtual flowers by email or mobile for Mother’s Day

Posted by Bryan on March 15, 2010

On Sunday it was Mother’s Day here in the UK. So, to help children of all ages celebrate their mums, the country’s largest children’s charity the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) launched a neat little fundraising microsite offering virtual flowers that donors could send via their mum’s email or mobile phone on the morning of the big day in return for a £5 donation.

I’m not too sure quite how those mums at the receiving end will have felt when their usual chocolates or roses were replaced by an email or text message, but it’s a nice example of a charity extending the reach of its online fundraising activity to incorporate internet-equipped mobile phones.

With well over 10m people in the UK now using smartphones to browse the web, and that number growing by the month, I’m surprised that more charities aren’t already taking advantage of the emerging opportunities to engage people through their phones as an extension to traditional ‘virtual gift’ offerings like Oxfam’s ‘Unwrapped’.

However, I expect we’ll see a lot more such campaigns over the coming months as fundraisers realise that mobile fundraising can now go way beyond just telemarketing and SMS donations.

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Posted in Email, Mobile, Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Could QR Codes be big for online fundraising?

Posted by Bryan on May 18, 2008

Over the last few weeks I’ve started to see quite a few little black ‘maze’ icons (like the one above) on advertisements in papers and magazines here in the UK. While they may look like the latest evolution of the Sudoku puzzle craze, they are actually QR Codes (QR = Quick Response) – basically bar codes containing details of a web address, which can be read by your mobile phone (if you have the right software installed). This one is actually the QR Code representation of the home URL for this blog.

You point the camera of your mobile phone at the code and the software translates it into a message and web address and takes you directly to the advertisers website. No waiting to respond until you get to a computer; no searching the phone’s menus for the internet browser; no URL to enter using your tiny phone keypad. If you can scan it, you can go straight to the site. Sounds like a direct response advertisers dream!

Thinking about it from the fundraising perspective, right now my daily papers are carrying a range of different ads requesting donations in support of either the Burma Cyclone or China Earthquake emergency appeals. In most cases the response options offered are threefold: a traditional coupon, a credit card donation line (not always 24hr), and a URL. It’s pretty easy to see how in the future a QR Code, taking the reader direct to a mobile web donation page could streamline online response to such emergency ads. Read, scan, click, donation made – nice!

Over recent years there’s been a whole lot of discussion about the exciting future of the mobile internet, so the big question is just when we might start to see QR Codes being used in this way by fundraisers?

I first heard of QR Codes from one of our other planners at WWAV Rapp Collins, who had seen them all over the place during a trip to Japan back in August 2007 and predicted that we’d see them all over the place here in the near future. Sure enough, in early December 2007 the UK’s highest circulation daily paper The Sun devoted several pages to explaining and promoting QR codes – presumably hoping to get ahead of the curve in offering this extra response option to its advertisers. By the end of the following month the paper was reporting that its new service was a ‘hit’, with some 11,000 users, and announced intentions to continue to promote the approach.

While UK advertisers are clearly starting to test the approach, not only in The Sun but in listings magazines like Time Out, it’s still early days – but the potential for this type of response mechanic seems obvious. The fundamental barrier to its adoption on a mass scale is simply the need to download the QR Code software. This is freely available from i-nigma, whose smartcode reader is one of the most widely used (you can also create your own smartcodes on their website). But the truth is that most mobile phone users probably wouldn’t know where to start when considering downloading extra software to their phone, so adoption based on this is likely to be slow and gradual.

However, all that we need is for the major handset manufacturers to start shipping phones with smartcode reader software pre-installed and this could go mass pretty quickly. We can be sure that commercial advertisers will leap on the opportunity as soon as it starts to scale-up- and switched-on fundraisers shouldn’t be far behind.

Posted in Mobile, Online fundraising | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

Posted by Bryan on February 18, 2008

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I chose a broad and much discussed topic for my hosting of this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants: Creating and developing online communities through Web 2.0.

We kick-off with a very useful thought piece, originally guest posted by Beth Kanter on techsoup.org, entitled Determining Your Social Network Needs.

Then it’s over to Katya Andresen and Stacie Mann from Network for Good who offer a handy 11 Steps to success with Social Networking.

Staying with Social Networking, Josh Catone at Read Write Web marks Facebook’s fourth birthday earlier this month with a post considering whether Facebook might become a catalyst for wider social change.

On to a Social Network with a difference, NetSquared generated a load of discussion in response to its recent Think Tank question How Can Nonprofits use Twitter? – including the story of how the American Cancer Society is using twitter to promote its breast cancer research ‘Frozen Pea Fund’!

Joanne Fritz is struck by the potential to use Web 2.0 to engage with large numbers of donors giving small value gifts in her post The Long Tail of Fundraising: how small donations can make a difference.

Then we have a whole host of Web 2.0 Tech Tips from Social Signal – covering everything from blogging, del.icio.us, and RSS to advice on community content.

And finally a post from DonorPowerBlog by my old Seattle-based friend and colleague Jeff Brooks, with some suggestions on how to have Kiva’s problem – namely raising too much money!

That’s it for this week. But you can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants as it wends its weekly way across the blogosphere by subscribing to the carnival feed.

Posted in Blogging, Facebook, Fundraising, Mobile, MySpace, Second Life, Social networking, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

SMS fundraising ideas

Posted by Bryan on October 4, 2007

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If you’re interested in SMS fundraising then take a look at mobileactive.org, which promotes the use of mobile phones for all forms of civic action.

As well as providing lots of data relating to worldwide mobile phone use (usefully split by country) and a very active blog, you can also download a number of strategy guides – including one on using mobile phones in fundraising campaigns.

You need to register to use the site and download the guides, but it’s completely free and well worth a look if you’re thinking of adding mobile communications to your fundraising or advocacy programmes.

You might also have a think about the potential of t-shirts that text back – which I spotted a while ago.

Posted in Fundraising, Mobile, SMS | Leave a Comment »

Fashionable SMS fundraising

Posted by Bryan on July 25, 2007

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I originally mentioned this on livinginadigitalworld.com a couple of months back, but it’s such a fun idea that I thought it worth mentioning here too.

Reactee is a great online t-shirt site which not only offers shoppers the opportunity to share their views on any subject that takes their fancy through a personalised t-shirt – but takes t-shirt communication to a completely new level by creating clothing that “texts back”.

Every Reactee t-shirt displays the wearer’s personal slogan plus a keyword and SMS shortcode. Anyone interested in knowing more about the slogan – or the wearer – can text-in the keyword and will automatically receive a response set by the wearer. The responses can be updated as often as the wearer wants, and they receive a notification each time someone texts their t-shirt.

So far, Reactee t-shirt wearers apparently range from those just looking for a personal response (“Am I hot?” seems quite popular) to those wanting to raise awareness of charities or political campaigns. One young Democrat has created an “Obama for President” t-shirt and updates her text response each week with a new reason to support him.

Seems like there could be real potential for charities with their own shortcode services already in-place to replicate the idea in support of their own campaigning or fundraising.

Posted in Mobile, SMS | 1 Comment »

 
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