Not just during the holidays, but throughout the calendar year, mobile marketing for charitable fundraising purposes is on the rise around the globe.
Nevil Coleman, director of Cymba Integrated Solutions, writes in a new sponsored post on Marketing Week‘s U.K. site that using mobile marketing for fundraising has become quite the new norm in modern times.
“Anyone who has traveled on a train, read a newspaper or used the London Underground will have seen posters asking for, say, £3 via text to fund research into cancer treatments or to save an animal,” Coleman writes. “Direct Response Television (DRTV) adverts use SMS text as a response mechanism for charity campaigns: Unicef’s emergency appeal for Syria and the World Wildlife Fund’s sponsorship advertisement are just two recent examples seen on our screens. Increasingly, this method of acquiring new supporters only includes a mobile response.”
Beyond convenience, he says, there are many reasons why mobile messaging has proven so successful for fundraising.
‘For one thing, it is a highly dependable channel for acquiring or ‘prospecting’ new and often younger donors,” Coleman continues. “One reason for this is the versatility of the text-to-donate mechanism. The short code number (and keyword) to which people are asked to send a text is a shortened version of a phone number, which is easier to read and remember than a normal phone number. The brevity of these numbers allows them to be printed in many places. They are familiar to passengers on trains and the Underground and have been used on billboard posters, television adverts, at events, on radio – even on the side of a drink carton.”
Some industry analysts predict that the mobile channel will be the global fundraising industry’s biggest and most effective platform for raising money for good causes by the end of this decade.
