Integrating text messaging with fundraising = more dough

The mobile marketing agency Mobile Commons spent a lot of time at the end of 2008 working with one of its clients, the Humane Society of the United States, and their friends at the Watershed Company to come up with a nice mobile test for end of year fundraising. They wanted to give mobile subscribers an option to donate over the phone via an inbound call center after they received a text message promoting the call. It didn’t quite work out the way they planned; they received no donations over the phone. It did, however, produce a very interesting result: people who got the text message gave online with an increased response rate of 77%! They suppressed a third of their list to see if the text had any effect on online giving, and it turned out to have a huge impact. I share their excitement about all the different ways people are pushing mobile fundraising and hope that this integrated approach becomes another effective fundraising technique.

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