Mixed Signals on Text Messages

Charities try cellphone appeals to raise money and awareness, but the cost is high

After Hurricane Katrina, the American Red Cross raised $116,000 in eight weeks by working with

cellphone companies to run one of the nation’s first text-message fund-raising campaigns.

In newspaper ads and promotions during televised benefit concerts, cellphone users were asked to send a text message to their phone carrier by punching in a shortened phone number or “short code” — in this case, 24357, which stood for “2help.” In return, they received a message asking them to confirm a donation of $5 to the Red Cross; that amount was added to their monthly phone bill.

The Red Cross has a deal with the phone companies to run similar campaigns the next time a big disaster hits. What’s more, the organization is considering the use of text messages to alert people about potential trouble spots and to help mobilize Red Cross volunteers.

Like the Red Cross, other charities are toying with ways to use text messages — short written messages sent from one cellphone screen to another — to raise money, communicate with potential supporters, and promote advocacy efforts.

About 220 million Americans have cellphones, and a fast-growing number of them — especially young people — rely on text messages for instant communication with friends and family members.

Last June, Americans sent 12.5 billion text messages — up 71 percent over the same month in 2005, according to the latest industry figures. And it’s not all chitchat: People use text-message transactions to buy special ring tones and other enhancements for their cellphones, and millions of users have cast text-message votes for their favorite performers on the popular TV show American Idol.

“The nonprofit sector is just starting to grasp the power of this medium,” says Jeffrey J. Slobotski, manager of marketing and sales at United eWay, a subsidiary of United Way of America that is helping local branches of the charity to start text-message campaigns. “If we want to talk to the 18-to-34-year-old demographic, we have to go to where they are.”

Complicated Connections

Connecting to cellphone users, however, is not always simple.

Charities are still refining ways to best reach out to potential supporters, who must agree to receive text messages by sharing their otherwise private cellphone numbers or by calling a short code. And, unlike the open highway of the Internet, cellphone carriers like Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and others control the airways, so charities must gain permission from the companies to send out messages and to create the short codes to accept them.

Most frustrating to nonprofit groups, though, is the cost of doing business: Carriers typically charge as much as 10 cents for every text message to a cellphone user and take up to 60 percent of any financial transaction conducted that way.

If a donor punches in a $1 text-message donation to a nonprofit group that has set up a special system to collect such gifts, for example, the cellphone company is likely to keep at least 50 cents.

Cellphone carriers have occasionally waived their fees — as the nation’s major carriers did during the Red Cross’s text-message campaign for hurricane relief — but the standard practice of taking a big cut generally makes fund raising through text messages unattractive for charities.

For now, most nonprofit groups are using text messages to get ideas out, and not to solicit people.

Last month, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals started sending weekly text messages offering pet-care tips and other information of interest to animal lovers who sign up for the service by calling a short code or providing their cellphone number in a registration form on the charity’s Web site.

One of the first messages warned readers to keep dogs and cats away from treats and decorations that could harm them at holiday time. “Pets and party favors don’t mix,” it said.

In October, a new charity called Txt4aCause, in Newport News, Va., started sending daily inspirational text messages to about 100 people who pay the group $10 a month for a “subscription” and provide their cellphone numbers. A portion of the proceeds will go to cancer-fighting organizations, including the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Txt4aCause also plans to collect stories, poems, and quotes via text message from cancer survivors and then distribute them through the daily message service. Subscriptions will be free for people going through cancer treatments.

John Blackshire III, the charity’s 24-year-old founder, works at a cellphone retail store, and he has been raising money for cancer causes over the past couple years in honor of his mother, a cancer survivor.

“When I saw there were commercial companies doing daily text messages, I saw the potential to do it for a good cause,” he says.

“We can brighten people’s days with these messages, and they can be helping others at the same time.”

A Spam-Free Medium

Charity officials looking to engage people with text messages say they are attracted not only by the growing number of users, but also by the immediacy of the medium. Key, too, is the fact that, unlike e-mail, cellphones receive very little spam, and industry surveys show that users open nearly all of their messages.

Most of all, charity officials and technology consultants say they want to gain familiarity with text messages because it could be the next big thing — like Web sites and e-mail once were — in communicating with supporters.

“It feels like the early days of online fund raising when some nonprofits were out front exploring what worked, and then everybody, everybody jumped in,” says Michael Stein, a Berkeley, Calif., consultant who is writing a series of white papers on cellphone technology for MobileActive, an Amherst, Mass., network of activists using cellphones to promote civic engagement.

Mr. Stein describes charity cellphone campaigns as still being in the initial, early-adopter phase, but ripe for a big breakout.

“It’s sad to say, but 9/11 is what pushed online fund raising to a new level,” he says. “My prediction is that all the activism, voter registration, and fund raising leading up to the ’08 elections could push mobile fund raising and advocacy to the next level.”

Meanwhile, charities running text-messaging campaigns have hit some bumps in early efforts.

Oxfam America, the Boston international relief group, ran into trouble in 2005 when it tried to get people to sign a petition via text message to protest international rules of trade.

Oxfam had collaborated on the effort with the band Coldplay, which promoted the petition on tour at about 30 concerts. Billboards, posters, and a video featuring Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, instructed concertgoers to enter a short code that corresponded to the word “trade,” and then key in their e-mail addresses. Doing so would add them as signatories to the petition. Oxfam collected 60,000 new signatures during the band’s tour, but only 1,000 of them were from text messages.

The problem, says Adrienne Smith, an Oxfam spokeswoman, was that people were unfamiliar with calling a word instead of a short code, or they were unable to make the call successfully because of varying number and letter configurations on their cellphones.

And, Ms. Smith says, the petition campaign did not sufficiently articulate the urgency of the fair-trade issue.

“One of the distinguishing features of a cellphone campaign is its immediacy. People are holding in their hands a way to react, get involved immediately,” Ms. Smith says. “We didn’t take advantage of expressing that angle. It wasn’t do or die.”

Moving People to Action

Whether charities can infuse cellphone text-message campaigns with substance, urgency, or other qualities that move potential supporters to action is a litmus test for nonprofit groups, says Allison H. Fine, author of Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age.

“People control their cellphone number and they are not going to allow it to be used unless they feel connected to the activity or the organization,” she says. “This should not be like an exercise in spamming where you are just trying to increase the numbers on your call list, but more about how to use text messaging to connect to people in meaningful and trusting ways.”

That’s one reason why Jo Sullivan, senior vice president of communications at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, says her organization will continue to send pet-care tips to its new text-message subscribers for at least a year before trying to raise money from them.

“We want to share our knowledge, give them important content, build a relationship before we ask for a donation,” Ms. Sullivan says, noting that the ASPCA employed the same strategy when it started sending e-mail alerts seven years ago. “We spent a year cultivating donors before we made our first online ask.”

Other charities are waiting to see if cellphone carriers’ fees will come down before they try fund raising with text messages. Mr. Slobotski of United eWay says that as many as 15 local United Ways will start sending text messages over the next few months, but they won’t include a solicitation for now.

“The push is volunteer engagement, getting people to text in to get on a list to be alerted to volunteer opportunities and things like that,” he says. “Fund raising will be phase two when the rates come down.”

It is unclear whether phone companies will respond to the growing pleas for more-favorable rates.

Debra Lewis, a spokeswoman for Verizon, one of the country’s biggest carriers, declines to discuss its fee structure for text-message transactions. She says that the company’s billing, collections, and disbursement systems are not set up to handle charitable donations. But, she adds, the company has worked with individual charities like the Red Cross on a case-by-case basis.

Virgin Mobile, a cellphone carrier with four million, mostly young, customers, has also struck special deals with charities. For two weeks last month, the company collected and matched $1 donations to benefit two AIDS organizations from customers who sent a text message to a short code that corresponded to the word “fight.” A total of $26,000 was raised.

The company also sponsored a text-message novella promoted to its customers. Over six weeks ending in October, more than 11,000 customers who agreed to receive the messages were sent twice-daily, short installments of the novella, which told the story of a homeless high-school athlete.

Virgin Mobile gave a portion of the text-message fees it collected from users who downloaded the messages to two charities: YouthNoise, an online network for young activists, and Stand Up for Kids, a San Diego charity that helps homeless youngsters. Thirty-five thousand customers were also given a one-time chance to make a $1 donation via a text message to Stand Up for Kids that Virgin Mobile matched. Seven hundred people made the gift.

Marco Johnson, a Maryland teenager, subscribed to the story and was one of the $1 contributors. He says he thought the story was slow to unfold, but it showed him how tough it is to be homeless. Reading about the issue and reacting with a charitable donation through his cellphone was a welcome and natural affair for Mr. Johnson.

“I’m checking my phone for incoming messages like a bazillion times a day,” he says. “This is how I talk to friends, make plans, everything. It makes sense that companies and charities want to talk to me this way too.”