April 3, 2008 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Text messages to mobile phones are going to become an increasingly important way for nonprofit organizations to reach out to their supporters, several speakers told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.
More than 1,100 charity technology officials, consultants, and company representatives gathered here to discuss how charities can make the best use of technology in their work. The annual meeting is organized by the Nonprofit Technology Network, in Portland, Ore.
Text messaging has some real advantages over e-mail as a form of communication, said Dane R. Grams, online strategy director at the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington advocacy group that focuses on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues.
For now, mobile phones aren’t overrun with spam, he said, and while many people have multiple e-mail addresses — some of which they check infrequently — most have only one mobile number.
“We wanted to call on our most active supporters to act on a moment’s notice,” said Mr. Grams. “Most people have a single cellphone, and it’s always with them.”
The Human Rights Campaign has been experimenting with cellphone messages since August.
The charity sent messages encouraging supporters to call their members of Congress to ask them to support the Matthew Shepard Act, which would strengthen federal hate-crime laws.
The alerts included a phone number supporters could call. (Most phones highlighted the number, and recipients could simply click on the link to place the call.) They would then hear a message that suggested key points they should make in their conversations with Congressional staff members before being connected to their representative’s office.
The first alert went to about 6,000 people, 154, or 2.6 percent, of whom made a phone call. By the time the group sent a second message, its cellphone list had grown to about 7,000 people, 374 of whom called their legislators, or about 5.2 percent.
To date, the organization’s use of the medium for fund raising has been limited. At the end of January, as the group’s annual membership drive was coming to a close, it sent out text messages encouraging people to join or to renew their support.
But the Human Rights Campaign hopes to soon send out fund-raising appeals to members of its mobile network that would offer to connect them to a live operator who could take their donation information.
The Human Rights Campaign’s mobile network recently crossed the 10,000 subscriber threshold, and Mr. Grams said the growth has changed the way the organization thinks about cellphone campaigns.
“Nobody paid attention to this program before, and now people are starting to pay attention to it at HRC,” he said. “People are thinking about everything we do, every action we take, every program we run, how can we incorporate mobile.”
Nonprofit organizations can also use mobile technology in their programs, said Jed Alpert, co-founder of Mobile Commons, a New York company whose software helps organizations automate cellphone campaigns. As an example, he pointed to FishPhone, a mobile service run by the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation organization in East Norwich, N.Y.
Someone who is thinking about ordering fish at a restaurant or buying it at the grocery store can send a text message to the organization with the name of the fish he or she is considering and receive a message with information on the environmental and health issues related to that species. If the institute has significant environmental concerns, the message will suggest less harmful alternatives.
Mr. Alpert recommended that as charities start to think about how they can use text messaging to carry out their missions, they should look at how mobile phones can fit into their overall approach to reaching supporters, rather than starting a mobile program unrelated to their other communications efforts.
He said that groups might want to start collecting cellphone numbers from their supporters, even if they are not entirely sure how they might incorporate text messaging into their work. But if groups decide to do that, he said, they need to make sure to immediately send the people who provide a cellphone number a text message welcoming them to the organization’s mobile network.
“Otherwise, they’ll just never intellectually make the connection,” said Mr. Alpert. And if the organization sends them a message three months later, “they’ll be like, ‘What the hell is this?’”
