Fundraising by Text Message: What Worked and What Didn’t

To help provide a permanent home for the towering glass “Lime Green Icicle Tower” sculpture pictured here, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, placed a sign next to the artwork asking viewers to give $10 by text message.

Only about a dozen donors did, which didn’t cover the several hundred dollars a month the museum paid to offer the service. (The museum did raise the $1-million it needed to buy the piece by artist Dale Chihuly, thanks largely to an aggressive email campaign.)

“It didn’t go over well,” Terry Lighte, the museum’s director of donor relations, says of the text-message campaign. “People rally around an urgent need.”

That was the case when the Salvation Army solicited gifts by text to assist survivors of a devastating tornado in Moore, Okla. The charity received $450,000 in gifts by text that year, an increase of about $100,000 over the previous year.