Not Everyone is as Cool as You - Mr. Mobile Giver

Ruffini had a piece last week on the shortcomings of mobile giving. Simply put, he’s voicing the same conclusions we've reached -- that political and charitable mobile giving through SMS is a nonstarter. (If you want the gory details look here).

He then goes on to talk about what a "dead simple" way of mobile giving would look like.

I would like to stop for a minute and point out the two most important things to keep in mind before we go down this road.

1) Not everyone in this country is as cool as us.
2) Not everyone in this country has the same mobile devices as us.

I would be willing to bet that 95% plus of the people reading this post are either on iOS, Android, RIM or some variant of Windows (Mobile or Windows Phone 7). While these are all great operating systems, we have to keep in mind that the vast, vast majority of people in the US are not running "smart" mobile phones. They are running “feature” mobile phones.

The difference is critical. And while we can get into the weeds on technical definitions, I would generally say that "smart" phones are those whose operating system allows the creation and downloading of third-party apps. Key advantage – the ability to create and deploy additional functionality to the mobile device.

The problem is most people in the US have mobile “feature” phones. Their mobile device is limited, for all time, to the programs that were burned into the ROM at the factory. In fact, in Q1/Q2 2010 80% of mobile phones shipped were simple feature phones.

So this killer mobile donation system is going to have to run on these simple feature phones or we’ve eliminated nearly 80% of our potential donors. I know that smart phones will become more prevalent, but that will take time. A long time.

Go to your local mobile phone center walk past the cool phones that interest you and look at the devices they sell for a penny. This is what your average donor is carrying. Look at its operating system and programs. The only way you will be able to scale mobile giving is to build a platform that leverages the apps that preexist on these low end devices.

But make sure to cross TCP and Browsers off your toolkit. Only about 30% of mobile handsets sold today have a browser, and the handset makers are only planning for 60% by 2015.

I can find only two apps that run on all of these phones, the ability to send SMS, and the ability to make a phone call.

The person that can leverage those two tools for mobile giving will be very popular.