Mobile Tech for Social Change and Micro-volunteering

Today, I attended "Mobile Tech for Social Change DC", sponsored by Mobile Active and Google. It was a great day full of learning, sharing, and musing with professionals from all walks of life--community organizers, vendors, academics, nonprofit and government professionals, you name it. PI even got to play with one of those "one laptop per child" laptop's (the little antenna ears are as cute as they look), and let me tell you, they are super neat!

You can follow reports on this event on Twitter (#m4change), and I plan to post a summary of my key takeaways, but there was something so exciting I saw today, I could not wait to get home and blog about it!


During the "Speed Geeks and Applications" session where all kinds of entrepreneurial-minded folks got to show off some of the applications they have been developing using mobile technologies, and one in particular really caught my attention.

First, let me draw your attention to a recent report that estimates the value of a volunteer hour in 2008 to be worth nearly $21. With the down economy and skeletal staffs, this is not something to sneeze at.

And then, let me introduce you The Extraordinaries, a mobile app that promises (and I have seen the demo so it does!) to deliver s micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.

Huh, you say? Well, as Jacob Colker, co-founder and president told me, the idea is to allow people to volunteer any time anywhere, since for most of us, the main constraint for volunteering is having to actually go somewhere and find dedicated hours in a week to do so.

So, how does this Micro-volunteering work? Well, you download an App onto your smart phone (iPhone App is coming soon and believe me people, it's super neat!). And then, say you are standing in line at the grocery store and the lady in front of you is unloading 57 jars of orange juice all of which she considers 1 item in the 10 items or less express lane.

Well, using this app, you could use the time to look through photos archived by the Smithsonian and tag them with common elements you recognize in the photo so people coming after you who are searching for info can easily find stuff in the archive.

Or, you could spend the time recording short MP3 "Thank you" messages to donors that would be delivered to their voice message boxes.

Or, you could spend a few minutes transcribing a piece of a video you saw. Or reviewing homework for a child in a far off land. And you can do this in multiple languages!

So basically, you can harness the power of millions of mirco volunteering minutes into oodles of volunteer hours, worldwide.

Exciting? Yes! A new frontier in volunteer development and management? Yes! Can't wait for the apps to go live and to get my hands on this? Absolutely!

(In our next post, key lessons on growing mobile lists and examples of nonprofits combining mobile with our DR methods).

The Pre-Requiem for the RFP?

For those of you who may not have seen this yet, I just had to share a recent blog post from fellow blogger John Lepp.

A controversial topic, and John, you are a brave soul for venturing into this, but so well written!

Here is an excerpt to wet your appetites:

And now you wait…

Within hours, the proposals start to flood in like some great rising
tide.

YAY!
Look at all of these suppliers who want to help us! Wow! Look at
how thick this one is! My gosh, look at the stock this one used -
oooooooooo…

The hours, turn to days, turn to weeks (maybe you shouldn’t have put an end
date so far into the future) and finally the drop dead day arrives and you can
now disregard any more submissions. Whew.

Read the entire post on John's blog, and share your thoughts on the future of the RFP.

Want to get younger donors? Give them themselves.

A note to my readers: you may have noticed that blog posts are less frequent lately. That's because I have taken to sharing interesting news and thoughts on Twitter. But, I am still planning to post on this blog when something just can't fit into 140 characters.  You can follow my Twitter updates on this blog and also let me know which, if any, of the things I Tweet about you'd like to see more in depth blogging about.

Recently, I came across an article talking about Ford's new Social Media campaign for it's for Fiesta. The bottom line for Ford is trying to bring this very successful European brand, popular with European urbanites, to the U.S. 

So what did Ford do? It had a contest where bloggers from all over the U.S. blogosphere could submit their credentials for why they should be allowed to test drive the Fiesta. All Fords asks is that those chosen share their honest opinion with their readers and on the Fiesta's Agent's site. Reeking of James Bond, the Agents also will have Missions to complete that the audience can read all about.

A smart move by Ford? This has certainly generated a lot of buzz and 100 people somewhere in the U.S. are getting free use of a car for 6 months, but what caught my attention here is that Ford's campaign is one in what I believe is a trend that has been around for a while in the commercial world-- creating a sense of "you be the judge" when targeting younger consumers. So, instead of having some actor in a commercial tell us all about the wonderful gadgets on the new car, Ford is challenging 100 people my age to tell me all about it, and, if they don't like something, to tell me about it as well. 

With Gen Y's sensitivity to being "sold to" it would only make sense that marketers would eventually catch on to a form of selling without selling-company-sponsored peer reviews of products.

Another example of this is Microsoft, which appears to have finally developed a campaign that grabs some attention away from Apple.  "Regular" people just like me are given $1500 and told to buy whatever laptop they like that meets their needs, and whatever they don't spend, they get to keep the difference.  Most of the ads show the regular people just like me going for a PC and pocketing some change.  These ads have been pretty popular and are widely lauded as successful?

What I find so interesting about this is the similarities in the two campaigns.  This is not suprising-once someone figures out how to grab a target group's attention, almost everyone interested in that target group inevitably follows, rendering the "new" technique not so new.

Those of us in DM are pretty familiar with this--someone develops a package that works--say adding multiple stamps onto the RE. Results shoot thru the roof. Word spreads thru the industry and before you know it, everyone is using multi stamp REs, and while results improve, they don't generate the ginormous lifts they did for the first person who thought of it.

Brands have been jumping on the 'real' consumer bandwagon left and right. Just yesterday, I saw a Nesquik ad (remember the bunny), where I could watch videos of people professing their love for Nesquik, including a person talking in French to a vending machine.

So the trend seems to be we consumers want to see ourselves enjoying the various products we are being sold, evaluating them, discussing them. No ad man is going to tell us what to think.

How will this translate into the fundraising world? Well for one, this may mean the phrase many of us cringe at--directed giving. Yes, yes, we know better than our donors how and where the money we need should be spent, and the pain of tracking directed giving, but donors want a say in where the cash goes and they increasingly want it tracked.

This may also mean a change in who is speaking to our donors. Traditionally, DM letters are signed by a senior level person-a VP, founding president, director of fundraising.  Should emails increasingly come from field staff sharing their experiences? Should we "edit" them as much as we do for fear of saying anything negative about our efforts?

Or, if say, you are an organization that raises funds for solar ovens to be distributed to women all over Africa to save them countless hours collecting biomass for cooking? How about giving 100 of those things to kids like me all over the U.S. and we send you our favorite solar oven recipes? Maybe we even find a few flaws, but who knows, there may just be a way to make the future generation of donors feel like the ones asking them to help are just a reflection of themselves.

The Mobile Fundraising Tipping Point is Here

In my last post I wrote about mobile fundraising and wondered when someone would finally figure out a way to make it work for all of us. And it would just figure, that just the next day, I ended up at an evening session sponsored by Mobile Monday's DC chapter on "texting for dollars"--or how to raise money via mobile messaging.

My takeaway? The mobile tipping point is here, and we are right on the cusp of the mobile fundraising wave. By this I mean, that we are right on the cusp of that point where all the kids starting showing up with those iPod headphones, and a couple of adults here and there, and you notice that some new trend is taking shape--one that will hopefully follow the iPod trajectory into "even grandma has iTunes."

So what happened that evening that made me think this way? Well, first and foremost, I learned that mobile giving is now possible with steps that really are very easy.

Don't believe me?

For those of you reading in the United States, grab your cell phones and start a new text message to the following phone number "20222."

Now, pick your favorite organization and type their mobile giving keyword into the body of your text message. Here are some samples or you can pick from a full list at the Mobile Giving Foundation's Website. (only type in the keyword). Warning, this process may result in you parting with $5 for a good cause.

ASPCA: GIVE

DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS: DOB

MAKE A WISH: WISH

OPERATION SMILE: SMILE

Once you have texted your keyword, you will get a text message back verifying your intent to donate $5 to your charity of choice. If you would like to finalize the transaction, simply text back YES. It's that simple for the donor. Two text messages 1 word each.

The donation gets added to the monthly phone bill from whoever happens to be the donor's cell phone carrier.

From a nonprofit's point of view, the process does take a little set-up. While the Mobile Giving Foundation is not the only one making this process possible, since I'll tell you how it works with them since I understand that process the best at this point. First, a little about what the Mobile Giving Foundation does and what it's role is in the whole process:

"MGF serves as the link between a charitable giving campaign, the wireless industry and the 250 million wireless users in the US. We vet all NPOs who use the mobile channel, certify all mobile giving programs, provide industry-wide guidance for charitable campaigns and establish, with industry-wide input, the guidelines and standards for mobile giving. Additionally, we facilitate the text messages through our platform, help NPOs market their campaigns, collect funds generated through mobile giving campaigns from the carriers and then distribute the collected funds to NPOs. "

As a nonprofit, you register with the Mobile Giving Foundation through an ASP: AN approved application service providers (ASP) who will manage the technical components of your mobile giving campaign. A full list of Mobile Giving Foundation approved ASPs is can be found on their website.

OK, so what's all this going to cost you and is it worth it?

Well, registration runs around $500. Then there is a monthly service charge that Mobile Giving charges your ASP, and that becomes part of the charge your ASP charges you. So, you may end up paying a flat monthly fee to your ASP, or a certain % of each donation, or both. Importantly, you pay nothing to the phone companies--they've agreed to do all this for free.

There are still a lot of kinks that need working out, for example:

• currently donations are limited to $5 or $10 (mobile operators don't want to take on more risks and the Mobile Giving folk figured the text-messaging target population might balk at a higher rate)


• contact frequency--currently, you can't text these people back after the donation has gone thru, but this might change soon


• share of DM dollars: to call text messaging fundraising an R&D experiment for most organizations is probably overstating it's share of the direct response pie

But there are several key reasons that I think we have reached the tipping point:

• The kinks are getting worked out. Someone has now developed, and gotten the buy in of all major cell phone carries "a could not be easier to use" way of texting donations


• The market is huge: "Charitable giving in the US amounts to almost $300 billion a year, with 76% of that coming from individuals. Given the almost total saturation of the US population by wireless devices (250 million subscribers), and the exponential rise of text messaging (used by 68% of 18-24 year-olds, 37% of 35-44 year-olds and 14% of those over 65), it is easy to see how development of a "Mobile Giving Channel" could vastly increase the pool of charitable donors"


• From a long-term planning point of view, this is similar to the URL scenario of the mid 1990's. Get your keyword now, or pay someone else to use it later.


• And I think, most importantly: if things go as planned, you will be able to, in the near future, send up to 4 text messages a month to someone who donated to you via this method. This will transition mobile messaging from a one-off, to a group of donors prime for cultivation. You will now be able to:


• Ask donors for email and other contact info and get them to opt into all kinds of programs


• Create a mobile monthly sustainer program. Get donors to agree, and send them a text each month. They reply with a "yes" and you get $5. That's $60 donor on an annual basis. With no DM cost. No bad.

I will continue to keep an eye on this and report back, but I am certainly very excited about the future of this (altho my phone bill, which with all the giddy practicing and demonstration now has an extra $50 in $5 charges, is not so excited).

(picture at start of blog from textually.org)