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Mobile Means Flexible

There are some parts of the world where you can walk up to a soft drink machine, point your mobile device at it, push a few buttons and out pops a refreshing beverage. In the U.S., you’re hard-pressed to send a charity $10 via mobile devices. That’s all changing and in a hurry. Social media on mobile devices are pushing charities and major carriers to do more. Crisises around the world need immediate responses and donors are texting in response. Yes, the thumb is an amazing digit. There’s more to mobile marketing and donor relationships than the response to crisis. During a recent NPT Executive Session, several experts talked about the implications of mobile donor engagement. The participants included: Lori C. Held, director, marketing, Trout Unlimited in Arlington, Va., Steven MacLaughlin, director, Internet solutions, Blackbaud in Charleston, S.C., Jason Wood, director of Internet services, The Salvation Army National Headquarters in Alexandria, Va., and James Young, senior product strategy manager at Convio in Austin, Texas. Moderating the panel were Paul Clolery, editorial director of The NonProfit Times and Rick Christ, vice president of online fundraising for Amergent/NPAdvisors.com

Paul Clolery: Here’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of weeks. During the 1950s and 1960s, volunteers in the United States looked a lot like June Cleaver. After getting Wally and the Beav off to school, she was volunteering at the local hospital or another civic enterprise. As the nation evolved into two-income households, we started seeing episodic volunteering where you’d help build a house for Habitat for Humanity on the weekend, or you’d help clean up a river bank. The very nature of volunteering changed. With the advent of mobile giving, where you can text $10 to a cause, are we evolving from a backbone of givers to people who will quickly give episodically and think that their job is done?

Steven MacLaughlin: Maybe, I think one thing you would find is that mobile is probably the first response channel of choice; it’s easy, it’s straightforward …

Clolery: For whom?

MacLaughlin: For your average donor, right? Your average person who is watching the Sunday football game and the number flashes up on the screen. They’re aware of it. Now whether that translates beyond big disasters remains to be seen.

Clolery: How can you say it’s the method of choice when in general the number of mobile gifts is so small compared to all the others?   Rick Christ: No, he said the first channel of choice.   MacLaughlin: It’s the first response channel.

Christ: It’s the one I can do now before I get back to my office.

Lori Held: It’s the most convenient.

James Young: It’s something you can do at the grocery store. If I’m out and I’m doing something in my normal life, and I see something on the news, I’m not going to break out my laptop to be able to make a donation or write a check. But if I can do it on my mobile phone, I can do that right then.

Christ: I had a boss once who said…

Clolery: ‘You’re fired?’

Christ: Before he said that, he said, ‘Well what we want to do is create deviant behavior’ and he didn’t mean it in the sense that Paul thinks. He meant that we were going to go wash the car, that we were going to go clean the kitchen, and the letter that we sent them or the email message that they got made them deviate from that path because we got them so impassioned, so angry, so guilty, that they’ve done what we asked them to do. The telephone is an opportunity to be more invasive than any other medium has ever been. We choose to allow it to be because we don’t want to be out of touch with our loved ones. And, it allows that message to reach us, or, to go out and reach out to somebody else.

Held: Texting a gift is an impulse. If you think about it in terms of a grocery store, you know at the checkout they’re going to offer you opportunities to buy chewing gum and Lifesavers and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to walk up and down the aisles and choose your real groceries. You know you’re still going to have your favorite charities and things that mean the most to you. Hopefully, those are the ones that continue to get your support.

MacLaughlin: It’s great for acquisition but my guess is it’s probably pretty poor on the retention side so that’s the thing you always have to balance out. If I can get this gift today, that’s fine, but I how do I retain that person?

Clolery: But you’re not getting very much information on that person from the mobile channels. You’re just getting the dollars, 100 or 120 days later and getting very little else.

Christ: I have a question about this, are you going to get the phone numbers? Are you going to get my phone number for my gift or are you just going to get some of my money?

Wood: We’re going to get your money and your area code and prefix.

Held: You don’t get the phone number?

Christ: So you can’t reach back to me?

Wood: We can text you back, and encourage you to visit our Web site.

MacLaughlin: If you opt in.

Christ: But you can only text through that same middleman?

Wood: Correct.

Christ: I want to take exception with you, Steve. I think that clearly Text Haiti to 52000 is that acquisition device, that impulse device. I see lots more things happening on the telephone. My boss told me this vision, and this is in several years, you’ll open your cell phone and there will be a holographic image of a child and parents leaving a hospital, happy faces. It will come because he’s a monthly donor, and the people that he interrupted the conversation with and will say ‘What was that?’ And he will say ‘This is a happy kid and his parents going home from the hospital, ‘Well why…’, ‘Because I am a monthly donor.’ I do a lot of advocacy work. My thought is to text you and to say ‘Your Senator just signed on to this bill that you’ve already signed a petition for…click here to thank him or her.’ I think there is a lot of that opportunity, but it’s way past the text gift. When I’m willing to give my cell phone number to an organization or, willing to follow them on Twitter, in either way they can now reach out to me when there’s urgent news, good or bad. From a retention stand point, I think there’s a great opportunity there to encourage further giving down the road.

Clolery: Apple announced its new product, the pound and a half iPad. And you know Motorola is going to be right behind them with one, and everybody else. You’re going to be able to do everything you can possibly imagine on this iPad or whatever everybody else comes up with. Is mobile giving, as in texting a message, going to have a very short shelf life as we evolve to other digital means?

Christ: I met a guy yesterday who’s cooked up an iPhone app that basically optimizes a nonprofit’s donation form for an iPhone. It’s Web enabled. It’s not a $10 text gift. It’s a whatever you want credit card gift. I asked him, “Were you able to fill in a background feature where I can store my credit number in my phone and when I make a gift to this, that or the other organization they can say ‘Do you want to use this credit card?’ and I can say “Yes!” instead of digging it out, it’s hard to do while you drive, especially with a cup of coffee in your hand. I see the device expanding to lots of different opportunities.

Young: I think mobile giving is not just Text to Give. Text to Give is probably some very small part that will always be there because of the convenience factor. It really is simple to just text a number, a keyword to a number, and be able to give $10. But for organizations that want more than $10 per gift, donors give more than $10 when they go online. All of the other mobile giving things that you described, just the mobile optimized form, being able to give through a mobile application, those are the kinds of things that will be more meaningful in mobile giving going forward. You mentioned the idea of storing your card. There are services out there that let you do that. They give you a PIN. Essentially, if that service integrates with other donor management systems, then I want to make that donation through that application, I just enter my PIN number. That kicks off some sort of process that goes and gets that information. It should all be possible.

Clolery: I had drinks here last night with a friend of mine who left his cell phone at the ATM, literally 100 yards from here. It was long gone. All of the information on that cell phone is now out there. In what you explained, that credit card number app would be in the wind, too.

Christ: I have complete confidence that somebody at Convio or Blackbaud or DonorPerfect or somewhere else, is working on a security feature which I will never understand but which will protect me from that.

Held: You know there are a lot of donors who don’t have that confidence.

MacLaughlin: I think there is some stuff already, like PCI compliance, regarding what you can and cannot do with credit cards that will solve that issue for better or for worse. MasterCard, Visa and AmEx have already said you cannot store data in certain places. When I put that number in, it’s not storing it in your phone it’s tokenizing it, sending it off somewhere else. If I lost my wallet I’d probably have some problems with that, too. I’m not sure there’s a big difference.

Clolery: That’s my point. It would be as if you’d been pick pocketed and your credit information is out there.

Christ: My credit card is one of the least sensitive pieces of information in my cell phone right now, and the most protected. You know my wife’s phone number, my daughter’s phone number, my Facebook password could cause me far more damage than the credit card. I would just call the credit card companies and tell them.

Held: That will be embedded with chips right, so you can’t lose it.

Christ: I want to go past giving. The next time Trout Unlimited does a photo contest, I bet most of the photos will come from fishermen who pull their cell phones out of their waterproof case, out of their vest, photograph that trout, release the trout, send you the picture. I’ll bet they’d love to get information on the winning the photographs sent back to them the same way. What does it have to do with giving? Lots, not in those two transactions, but in the communication that will follow because you’re binding them more closely or giving information on a stream that’s just been protected.

Held: Down on the stream, ‘The fish are biting.’

Clolery: That’s one of the things I was going to ask you about. Here’s this terrific organization, but it’s not exactly an emergency endeavor, which is what mobile giving has been about so far. What have some of your experiences been so far? What have you been testing?

Held: Well, we haven’t. We have a very small infrastructure in our organization. I’m anxious to let the bigger, more established organizations, pave the way and figure it out.

Christ: You’re right up there with 99.8 percent of nonprofits, maybe higher than that.

Young: To back track a second, when we were talking about mobile giving and the Red Cross and The Salvation Army, it’s like any other sort of engagement acquisition campaign. You get them in but then you follow up with them, to try and develop a relationship. You can do that via text. The first text contact usually is them making a donation, but you can follow that up and say ‘Just text us back your email address if you wish.’ Then it’s in your online marketing database. There’s no barrier to doing that. It’s just a matter of asking.

MacLaughlin: There’s a lot of attention on the mobile giving right now because it’s the shiny thing of the moment. But mobile has been around for a long time. It is finally becoming mainstream in the U.S. We’ve been doing mobile work in the U.K. for the past four years. We’ve learned lots of things, like they don’t use it for acquisition. What you’ll find is something like an Oxfam, in the U.K. They won’t use mobile as a giving channel because it’s very costly. They don’t have the carrier fees waived. It’s highly expensive to get that five pound gift, that 10-pound gift. What they’ll do, for example, at a Manchester United game there’s something that goes up on the scoreboard, ‘Learn more about Oxfam, text 50029.’ What they’re doing on their end is employing a call center, and that call center calls you back within 24 to 48 hours to get the rest of your details. That’s a lot of infrastructure around it. But those charities there that use mobile, that’s how they connect the dots. I’m sure in about six months there will be nonprofits in the U.S. that say ‘Oh, so what we need to do is to have call centers and other mechanisms to get the other data that we don’t necessarily get.’

Christ: Not to take anything away from my boss’s science fiction fantasies, but I see a time when the phone combines all this technology and GPS, and allows the Red Cross to reach out to me and say, ‘I know you’re a blood donor. I know you’re a Type A positive. I know you’re in Philadelphia right now, on Interstate 476. There is an emergency in Philadelphia. Here is where the nearest blood centers are and click here to find out how to get there.’

Young: You have to do that through an application because I have to opt-in to allow you to know where I am.

Christ: But is not the phrase for 2010 ‘There’s an app for that’?

Young: We just conducted a small, very informal, not so scientifically valid, survey of our clients to figure out what their attitudes are for mobile marketing. One of the questions we asked was, ‘For these various type of mobile campaigns, inbound text, outbound text, mobile content, mobile applications, what do you see being most important in one year and in three years?’ Mobile applications and mobile content were much more important than inbound and outbound text in a three-year window. In a one-year window they’re focused on texts. In a three-year window they’re focused on applications.

Clolery: Tell us a little bit about what the Salvation Army is doing.

Wood: This past Christmas season we did an iPhone app where you can download, shake your phone and get different tones. It’s like you’re standing at a kettle. You get the little chimes coming out. We had over 60,000 downloads. Those were free and it was fun and easy. I’m not an iPhone user. I have a Blackberry, so right away we’re thinking ‘Let’s see what we can do for the Blackberry.’ Now we’ve got all the Google phones coming out, so you really can’t anticipate where you want to spend your money next in terms of mobile apps. But the text message, we know that we need to do a better job in terms of immediate response, giving them the opt-in, an email to go visit our Web site, follow us on Twitter.

Christ: So when you start it up, you might not be able to go live.

Wood: Right. Whereas the iPhone app, there is a cost in developing it if you’re going to do it right. That being said, we are really excited to launch this and we put it out there in our overall national message, ‘Hey, we’re there. We’re mainstream and we’ve got an app for Christmas.’

Clolery: How much does an app cost?

Young: Something like $15,000.

Clolery: We’re not talking about a lot of money.

Held: But isn’t most of your donor base much older than the average donor? How is it being received by core supporters?

Wood: We are very anxious to lower that core. A lot of work has gone into everyone asking, ‘How do we get to the millennials?’ But then you think, ‘Wait a second. Let’s tap the 40 and 30-year-olds who have money as well.’ The iPhone app is kind of our tap, per se, ‘We’re hip and we’re reaching out to the millennials.’ We haven’t seen any increase in donations with that, but it’s just something we’re putting out there to say, ‘We kind of get it, and we’re trendy, and we’re doing all the things that the millennials want to see.’ Direct mail at Christmas time is our core. That’s where the money comes from, as well as the nickels and dimes from the kettles.

Held: Are you trying to integrate it with the traditional fundraising?

Wood: We’ve been doing that for years. At Christmas time we’ve taken our kettle and we’ve made it what we call our ‘Online Red Kettle.’ We run a peer-to-peer campaign where I’m always going to kettle and invite all my friends to give. It’s the same kind of thing as a walk- or a bike-a-thon but it’s virtual. There’s no end to the marathon, so to speak. We’ve tried to integrate that 100 percent.

Held: It’s not moving people from the mail to online. It’s offering them online.

Wood: It’s offering them online but it’s moving online to mail. The stats have shown that the donor who gives in both places has a higher value.

Young: It extends all the way through the chain. We’ve seen that folks who receive their mail piece and receive their email are 40 percent more likely to give. Mobile Commons conducted a study of sending an email vs. sending a text message and then following that with an email, which had something like a 70 percent increase in response.

Clolery: The volume of somebody’s text messages, unless they are 17, is not going to be the volume of their email. You’re going to have a greater opportunity for them to actually see the text message.

Young: People answer their text messages within 10 minutes as opposed to the time it takes most people to open an email.

Clolery: I get something close to 700 emails a day. I get three or four texts.

Young: The way they rolled out this campaign the text message was nothing more than ‘Hey, we’re going to send you an email tomorrow about this, look for it.’ It wasn’t the whole message it was just an alert.

Christ: Email is so yesterday.

MacLaughlin: It’s somewhere in this transitional phase. With the channels that people want to use, the technology is just going to keep changing. What’s your strategy for trying to engage people? Are you trying to cultivate? What are you doing with existing donors? What are you doing with new donors? And then, what is the best tool to use that? If I had an emergency, direct mail doesn’t help me right now. Web does help me. Mobile helps me faster but I don’t get all the information.

Clolery: It’s a faster response but the actual delivery of money is 100 days.

Christ: But up until two weeks ago (Haiti earthquake), there were 100 text gifts in the history of mankind.

MacLaughlin: A couple more than that.

Christ: And so phone companies, which are stodgy and slow and everything else, are going to not take a lot of chances. That changed overnight. They said, ‘We want to help you. We’re looking really cheap here if we don’t.’ They’re forced into it. I think they’ll respond.

Clolery: Well you’re making it sound magnanimous that they’re doing this out of…

Christ: Self-interest.

Clolery: No. It’s the people’s airways they are using. They should have no choice.

Christ: Why isn’t it self-interest?

Clolery: It’s not a matter of being good corporate citizens. The government has said they can use the air space. So the phone companies shouldn’t have a choice but to do it for free. There should be legislation along those lines.

Christ: There will be if they don’t do it on their own. They’re smart enough to know that. I don’t see that as an insurmountable issue at all. It’s almost already evaporated. It was just waiting for a flood to push that barrier down. I’d like to go a different route for a minute. Besides giving, what do you want your supporters to be able to tell you via a phone? You see a quick text message saying, ‘What do you think about this?’ a quick question, ‘We were interested in this, a,b,c or d.’ If it’s an iPhone app, or a text message, the donor could click back saying yes or no, ‘Because we need to make a decision on this right away and we value your opinion.’

Held: I’ll take that. At Trout Unlimited, we’re a conservation organization with a conservation mission, but we know our members are equally if not more interested in fishing. To keep them engaged and coming back to our Web site or to whatever our medium is, they need new information. They don’t just want to read about conservation. They want to read about fishing. And, it’s not just the latest fishing. It’s current conditions, is there a patch on this stream? How’s the flow on this stream? Fishing conditions are constantly changing. I don’t actually fish. But the organization is interested in trying to build more of a community that engages with one another about fishing on a daily basis. If you’re driving home from work and you’ve got your rod in the seat behind you and, and you’re in a chapter, we have over 400 chapters, maybe someone, one of your buddies from the chapter sends out a message and says ‘Hey you gotta get down here.’

Christ: And because you’ve expressed the interest in that geographic area, that watershed, you might be willing to get all those updates.

Held: And you know what, you’re going to renew your membership.

Christ: You’re getting valuable information. I saw this morning on the television there’s a new iPhone app where people can record ski conditions while they are on the slope. This is an attempt to get user input — what really the conditions are — and then, and so it’s the same thing.

Clolery: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen in the past 90 days with regard to mobile?

Young: I think CauseWorld is my most interesting thing. It’s very similar to Foursquare. It’s essentially an application that knows where I am. They’ve set up relationships with certain large corporations that supply a lot of restaurants and stores. If I go into a particular restaurant and it’s one of the ones in CauseWorld, I can check in. I’ve earned 10 points for being there, and then those points can then be redeemed for donations to a nonprofit that I choose.

Clolery: Well you’re at the National Press Club right now so you can…

Young: See now, I’ve just earned 10 points. To me, that’s pretty interesting because I’m doing what I want to do anyway. I’m able to turn it in to some sort of value for the nonprofits that I care about just by going out.

MacLaughlin: A lot of stuff is in that early stage of people adopting it and then it becomes more main stream.

Christ: Or not.

MacLaughlin: Two years ago, Facebook was where leading edge people were using social networks. Now it’s played out. It’s older populations. Everyone younger is moving to other types of things because their parents and grandparents are showing up on Facebook and they don’t want to be seen with them being on their list.

Clolery: What are the kids moving to on Facebook?

MacLaughlin: Well, it’s a lot more things like Twitter, Foursquare, SMS, you know, somewhere where I can go and have just my network of people who are interested in…

Young: It’s come back down again from the big network where Facebook is to sort of ‘My little micro networks.’ They are dispersed, so those people who use Loop which is the same thing as a Foursquare, and CauseWorld, they’re devolving into these individual networks that are usually more mobile based. It remains to be seen which one of those turns into the next Facebook.

Clolery: Will we necessarily have a next Facebook or are we now at the point where its microsites, microcommunities?

Christ: I think Facebook is just a global conglomerate of microsites. I don’t care about 99.9 percent of Facebook, frankly. I couldn’t tell you who half my friends are. If we have mutual friends and they ask to be a friend I’m not going to say no. But I care deeply about the two causes I belong to, the four groups that I am a member of, and my kids, and what they’re doing, which I hear more about on Facebook than I ever get in a conversation.

Clolery: This is going to make the database people go out of their minds. Right now Facebook has what, 350 million users? They’re tracking behaviorally everything that you’re doing. That’s going to become a very powerful database at some point. So how do consumers, donors, harness that so they’re not tracked behaviorally? How can they not give up more than they thought they were giving up?

MacLaughlin: Every month Facebook changes the privacy settings. First it was these things you could make private, and you’re going to see an increase probably in the amount of settings and fine tunings regarding what happens with your data and privacy because that stuff is out there. I would expect that to continue until somebody down the street here in Congress mandates they want to do something else with it. That’s probably where it’s heading. You can’t stop human nature. Some people want to share a whole lot. Some people don’t want to share anything. It’s the system that is going to have to keep in check privacy settings regarding what I want to share.

Clolery: Organizations are going into dozens or more social networks. How do database people keep up with all that to make sure that it all integrates into a master database so you can solicit?

Wood: It’s not so much your database it’s your communications folks. When Haiti hit, immediately Twitter went out, ‘Here’s what we’re doing we’re on the scene.’ There were Facebook status updates, and then a couple of hours later we have images on the Web site. But the immediate knee jerk reaction is ‘Let me send out a Tweet saying here’s what we’re doing, here’s how you can give.’

Held: You have to be completely staffed to do that, too. I mean completely staffed. I mean 75 to 85 percent of the attendees over at the DMA’s conference are not prepared to do any of that.  And there’s probably not a whole lot of pressure from senior management to make sure you’re getting that.

Christ: Because they’re afraid you’ll ask them a question. They all know the word ‘Twitter’ but they have no idea what it does. They probably know where the money is coming from and it’s not coming from Twitter right now.

MacLaughlin: It’s historical. If you go 10 years ago, the same things were being said about online giving and email: ‘Who’s going to use it?,’ ‘Wake me up when it’s over a million dollars,’ ‘Where do we store all these email addresses?,’ ‘Who cares?’ If things aren’t revolutionary they’re evolutionary. I’m waiting for the article that says ‘Online Giving Is Dead Along With Mobile.’ I think mobile is of interest because people have figured out, through all of the social networking buzz in the past two years, that it’s an engagement channel. If you’re looking for the dollars from that, that’s a much longer strain, unless you get an event fundraising or some other way where there’s demonstrated ability to raise funds through it. But Twitter is not going to get the next $20 million in the nonprofit, right?

Young: Your scenario causes challenges for Steve and I because we’re trying to figure out ways to integrate data and how it can make its way back into your donor database and your CRM system. It’s Facebook today and then it changes and then, ‘Well now, I’ve got to figure out how to be connected to the next one,’ and get that information in. The challenge for us is how we get those systems integrated.

Clolery: We always poll our readers. In one of my favorites, we sent out a letter and survey form to CEOs of nonprofits across the country. We asked them: ‘What method of giving do you most dislike and never use personally?’ And every one of them said, telemarketing. And every one of them had a telemarketing program. Is there a mobile app, process, something, that you guys absolutely don’t like, but yet have to use?

Held: Telemarketing was a little more out of our control. The new technologies aren’t as invasive, the whole concept of the phone ringing during dinner for instance. And, there was no caller ID. You had no idea.

Young: I wouldn’t say that I don’t like it, but Facebook can be a difficult partner to work with because they change so fast with little warning. I think it’s a great channel that has a lot of potential, but is difficult to keep up.

Christ: My boss said something else. We were talking about getting response from donors and he said ‘You know what else? You can actually talk to people on these machines, too.’ We haven’t talked about that at all here. You can invite somebody to call you and chat, ‘How’s everything?,’ ‘How’s the fishing?,’ ‘How do you think we’re doing in our Haiti relief effort?’

MacLaughlin: The more social media and people are engaging in this stuff, the more it breaks down your traditional marketing and communications plan of, ‘This is our message,’ ‘This is a photo,’ ‘This is our copywriting,’ where you convince everyone this is a story. Now the story is going the other way. It’s people talking about ‘I care about what the Salvation Army is doing’ and ‘I care about what…’ You don’t own the message as much now and that’s been the big thing for nonprofits over the past three years with social media. So who’s job is it going to be to review the 3,000 photos for the trout contest for the one photo in there that might be inappropriate? It’s that two-way, the Web 2.0. People are finally starting to get it. We have all this great potential, but it’s going to mean you lose a bit of the control of the message to do that stuff.

Wood: Yeah, especially when we start adding video. When the Flip is a fully integrated cell phone and you have some high quality upload and you see somebody walk into a thrift store. It would be great to have user video right from the street. We videotape some people, a one-minute or two-minute clip where they’re dropping some money in a bucket: ‘Just tell us today why you’re giving’ and just have a little story on YouTube. You can go a step further and invite the user to do it all themselves.

Young: There are some copyright challenges with that. I can’t take a video with a Van Halen song playing in the background. I don’t have rights to use that Van Halen song. You have to watch for those things.

MacLaughlin: I think you have to see things like the copyright laws change.

Christ: I think it will shift more towards the rights. If you’re videoing somebody in public and Van Halen is playing in the background, they don’t have a copyright problem with that, that was news, it was happening.

MacLaughlin: It’s more fair use.

Christ: So why doesn’t the Salvation Army or Trout Unlimited have the same opportunity? You are reporting the news. This is what’s happening at the kettle.

Clolery: I don’t think Trout Unlimited or the Salvation Army or anyone else would have a problem if, as you were suggesting, somebody was being videotaped putting coins in a kettle and a car behind them was blasting Van Halen. It was obviously not your intent to have Van Halen there. It was just an open air environment.

Christ: It’s hardly going to stop me from buying a Van Halen album. You know I’m not going to take that clip and play it all the time.

MacLaughlin: I’m sure the organizations will be a bigger target than if Steve by himself goes off and shoots video and posts it. If it gets removed from YouTube, big deal. You just have to keep an eye on if that happens.

Clolery: Five years down the road best case, worst case scenario for mobile. Everybody gets a shot at both of them.

MacLaughlin: Best case scenario is that nonprofits have figured out how to work mobile into all their other channels like direct mail, email, Web and everything else. Worst case scenario? It encourages a high amount of anonymous donors that are very hard to follow up with and contact, and that overall hurts giving in general.

Held: The worse case is a dead end. I guess I’ll just sit tight on the best case, I can’t picture it myself.

Christ: Enough organizations know enough about what I’m passionate about, that and my other preferences, that they’re able to reach out to me in real time, and give me the opportunity to do the things that make me feel really good about myself.

Wood: Yeah best case for us, it’s an immediate interaction with an existing constituent, who we have a solid relationship with, faster than email, faster than direct mail, and we’re soliciting a specific response. Worst case is where we’re at today, and we can’t increase the donation level. I can’t tell you the amount of emails and requests from my higher ups saying ‘What can we do to get more than $10 right now?,’ ‘Can we make it $15? Can we make it $20?’

Young: The best case is that mobile becomes a truly integrated part of the whole engagement strategy of nonprofits, and that even on top of that, that the carrier breaks down the shell to give via text. It’s still there but not limited to $10 per gift.