Mobile Fundraising is Kind of Like Tagging Along on Someone Else’s Date

I was at the Innogive ‘Mobile Giving Demystified’ Conference last week (http://www.innogive.org/events.html). First of all - great conference. High production value and Pepperdine was a great venue. One of the few places I’ve been that has a ‘wow’ factor to it.

I’d say about 300 attendees, most of them small to medium sized non-profits looking to see if they can turn mobile into one of the tools they use to communicate with and maybe fundraise from their membership.

Even though the technology is pretty straightforward I wanted a better understanding of just what was possible in the way of fundraising strategies on SMS. After all, SMS, unlike e-mail, is a closed technology and the carriers play a major role in what does, and does not, get on their networks.

The clear message I got was that there are three parties involved in SMS fundraising campaigns.

1) The carriers (ATT/Verizon et. al.)
2) The subscriber, who in this case also happens to be your donor
3) You.

And the first message was pretty clear - the ‘you’ part is a second class citizen.

Let that soak in.

The most important relationship is between the carriers and their subscribers. Why? Because texting is a huge business for the carriers.

“In June 2010, users sent 1.8 trillion SMS, or text messages, up 33 percent from the previous year. Multimedia texts (photos and videos) also rose sharply, up 187 percent to 56.3 billion messages” (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/10/ctia_cell_phone_growth_up_5_pe.html)

I don’t think anyone really knows how much the carriers make from SMS traffic. But, come on, 1.8 trillion messages per month and growing at 33% per year? That’s a whole lot of traffic to tax.

So the purity of that closed system is the upmost concern of the carriers. If SMS was to be turned into the Wild, Wild West like e-mail has, subscribers might be driven off SMS to another technology, maybe one that doesn’t drive fees for the carriers.

So that’s the first lesson, the carriers write the rules and your group is going to dance to them. As one of the panelists from the CTIA (The carrier trade group) said, marketers (that’s what the carriers call people like you) that step out of line are going to feel ‘pain’.

So what are the rules that you need to abide by? Hell if I know. I heard that to be legit on all the carriers there are 953 separate business rules to follow. I can feel the creativity of my fundraising message dying right now. I’m not even sure what the rules are, or where I can go to read them all, or how often they change. But if I violate them I’m subject to ‘pain’. Ugh.

Keep in mind that the ‘pain’ isn’t getting kicked off the network, it’s a fine.

Now let’s go to the second point, getting paid.

The payment actually goes through the carriers billing systems, and as people pay their bills, your part of the funds are transferred to your accounts.

Three major things to think about. First is that it might be weeks, or months, before you actually get the funds into your account. What you are thinking is correct. In the race to actually get funds, direct mail is faster than SMS.

Second is the dispute rate. Apparently there are subscriber/donors that read their bill and tell the carriers that the payment to you is bogus. How many? The CTIA people said that it’s safely in the single digits. That covers every number from 1% to 9%. In addition, what if the donor is actually a kid who is using a phone on their parent’s wireless plan? The kid makes the donations and the parents pay for it. That apparently is also happening.

Finally, the carriers actually cap the amount that people can donate (the amount was either $10 or $25, I was so floored by fact this I stopped taking notes for a few minutes). There was talk about raising the limit. But, still, to limit the amount people can donate to below what the average donation might actually be is painful.

Finally, what about managing the donors.

One of the questions I really wanted to get answered was what kind of data do I get back from the carriers. Is it a file with the name, amount and address of the donor? Not even. I talked to three different people and got four answers back. But it’s sounded to me that some of the carriers are just sending back phone numbers.

Try putting that in your Kintera deployment.

One very smart guy I talked to said there was a method of doing a reconciliation between the carrier billing files and the information sent to you – my eyes glazed over at the thought of going through all of that, every month, just to get some info on who is giving me money.

So it seems clear that unless you can match that donor mobile number to a pre-existing donor phone number in your main database you are forever locked into dealing with this donor by SMS, unless you can use an SMS message to drive them to a website where you can get some extended information. Is that allowed under the 953 business rules? Hell if I know.

So you might ask after all of this, why would anyone want to do SMS fundraising?

Simple, there’s a shit load of donors out there that you would never reach otherwise.

You see, the SMS fundraising has four things going for it.

1) The first, and most important, is the carriers have a billing mechanism in place for absolutely every mobile phone user in the country (excluding people on pre-pay cells). There’s no having the donor get out their credit card and type in their number, it’s automatic – the best form of impulse giving.

2) Just about every one of these subscribers, smart phone or otherwise, has some sort of texting capability – and they are trained to use it. Texting is one of the killer apps for mobile phones.

3) “Text Hati to XXXXX” is a much easier message to get out than just about any other form of fundraising destination (except maybe URL shortners).

4) It’s a lot cheaper than doing prospect mailing on every person in America.


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