May 29, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Mobile Giving Foundation, in Bellevue, Wash., hopes to bolster charitable giving via text messaging by bringing charities and cellphone companies together to reach wireless users in the United States.
“Mobile has not been available to nonprofits up until now,” says Jim Manis, founder of the Mobile Giving Foundation. “We view this as really enabling that channel for third-party nonprofits. We provide a single access point, that organizational layer.”
Before entering into an agreement with the foundation, an organization must have received charity status from the Internal Revenue Service. Once a group is approved, the foundation says it will help ensure that the charity’s cellphone messages are distributed effectively.
Contributions will be recorded on the donor’s wireless bill, and 90 to 95 percent of money raised will go the recipient organization within 90 days of the campaign’s close. Raising money through mobile text messaging has not always been feasible, because until recently cellphone carriers charged as much as 50 percent of the money donated via text message, which covered the cost of charging cell-phone customers for the donation on their monthly bill.
To test the viability of mobile giving, the foundation recently worked with United Way of America on a campaign that was promoted in a television ad that first aired during the Super Bowl and featured Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. In the advertisement, Mr. Brady asks viewers to make an instant $5 donation to support the United Way’s youth-fitness programs by text messaging the word “fit” to the number “864833″ — which spells out “United” on a cellphone keypad. Of the $5 donation, at least $4.50 ultimately went to United Way.
Organization officials say they received about $10,000 in text-message donations made during the Super Bowl, and contributions have continued to trickle in as stations continue to broadcast the 10-second ad.
“What it showed is that mobile should be integrated with their overall fund-raising campaign strategy,” says Mr. Manis. “If you take mobile, and integrate it with a campaign that might be Web-based or television-based or radio-based, it really provides that additional incentive for the donor to submit an impulse gift that they may or may not normally otherwise have given.”
Other campaigns under way at the Mobile Giving Foundation include the singer Alicia Keys’s “Keep a Child Alive” campaign to fight AIDS in Africa, which she has been promoting at her concerts.
The foundation has also started a campaign to raise money in support of its own efforts. So far, the Mobile Giving Foundation has raised a little more than $300,000 and is seeking additional money to support an operating budget of $1-million for each of the next two years.
For more information: Go to http://www.mobilegiving.org.
