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Seven weeks after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, donors have contributed more than $895-million to support relief efforts.

And now, new research on text-to-gift conducted by Convio, Edge Research and Sea Change Strategies on US charitable donors has been released. The data, gathered a week following the earthquake, indicates that mobile philanthropy, while not universally accepted is gaining traction with younger generations, and that the efforts around Haiti could be the tipping point for greater adoption. The mobile philanthropy results are part of a larger study that will be released in the coming weeks on the contrasting charitable habits of Gen Y, Gen X, Baby Boomers and Matures to provide the sector with insights on cultivating the next generation of American donors.

“The data presented not only shows the growing acceptance of mobile charity appeals, but also provides some interesting statistics on the contrasting habits of different generations,” said Pam Loeb, Principal at Edge Research. “Mobile technology presents a huge opportunity for nonprofits that want to reach specific groups of people – likely to be younger – and provide them with information in a convenient and immediate format.”

Key findings from the research include:

• 77 percent of respondents (US donors) were aware of the Haiti text-to-donate efforts;
• 17 percent of Gen Y respondents and 14 percent of Gen X said they made a donation to Haiti relief efforts via text message, and 3 percent of both Boomer and Mature respondents reported making a donation to Haiti relief efforts via text message;
• 28 percent of respondents with a mobile Facebook application texted a gift;
• Generally speaking, 36 percent of all respondents were willing to donate via text message after an emergency occurs and 31 percent were willing to donate via text message if a friend is raising money;
• Three percent of donors say that they received a text/SMS message from their top charities this year;
• Those who have received information from a top charity through text/SMS, feel that it is an important way to stay in touch with the charities they care about (71% say important).

“Previous to the earthquake little more than $1 million had been raised via mobile text but in the aftermath close to $50 million has now been raised through this channel, and represents another way for charities to engage with current and prospective donors, advocates and volunteers,” said Vinay Bhagat, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Convio. “The nature of SMS/text messaging is instant, convenient and has a multiplier effect when used with social networking tools, and we saw all of those benefits reinforced after the earthquake struck.”

The complete study, “Early Signals on Mobile Philanthropy: Is Haiti the Tipping Point?”, is available for download.

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If nonprofits found a silver lining behind the Haiti catastrophe, it was learning how fast a mobile campaign can raise a lot of money in a hurry.

Jim Manis, chairman and CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation in Bellevue, Wash, suggests that it takes about two weeks to create a mobile campaign.
Manis says that there are five steps to setting up the campaign:

• Nonprofits must apply for an NPO application package from the Mobile Giving Foundation. The application is a series of questions that ensure that the organization meets federal and state laws and operates with transparency. There is a one-time application fee of $350.
• Mobile Giving Foundation reviews the data and notifies wireless carriers that the organization has been approved.
• Once approved, an organization is given a short code and keyword for its campaign. This associates nonprofits with a billable action.
• Parallel to the application process, nonprofits should contact any of the foundation’s approved application service providers (ASPs). These organizations will help nonprofits use cross platform integration to design a mobile giving strategy that will work with the organization’s campaign.
• Once the campaign is designed and carriers have been notified, nonprofits are ready to go live with mobile giving. From there, a new database of donors needs to be managed properly for future giving.

courtesy: NonProfit Times

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by Deborah Fishman

An all-volunteer magazine put together by a geographically diverse, online community of young adults 22-40, PresenTense Magazine has always been a collaborative enterprise. As such, we’ve made ample use of many Google products, storing and sharing articles in Docs, communicating in Chat, and organizing and tracking article progress in Sites. Yet the lack of integration has made using all these tools in concert a challenge, and we are always interested in exploring better ways to perform these tasks.

For our tenth issue, PresenTense Magazine launched the Digital Issue – the first-ever print magazine to be published entirely in Google’s new tool for collaboration, Google Wave. The platform allowed us to pioneer new horizons for journalism by seeking to address a key challenge for journalists today: how to collaborate in a digital age.

Google Wave enticed us with the ability to collaborate on all aspects of the magazine production in a single package, as well as offering several new and exciting features. For instance, “playback” allows users to review the sequence of changes and easily restore a document to a previous version. Two modes of engaging with waves – edit and reply – give greater flexibility in editing documents and leaving comments for writers. Since edits and replies are updated in real time, authors and editors can interact naturally, as if in an in-person conversation. Wave also includes the ability to add images, maps, videos, and other gadgets right in the collaboration space.

It was especially fitting that we set out to explore Google Wave for our Digital Issue, focused on the Digital Age and how it is affecting young Jewish community – and identity – building today. Google Wave allowed us to take advantage of the very digital trends and technologies we were discussing, to produce content to act as the starting place for a larger conversation. We found that, while rough around the edges as a pre-Beta product, Google Wave has some real potential for online collaboration.

Ready to embark on a whole new world of Wave discovery, we soon realized that our first hurdle was getting on Wave to begin with. A collaboration tool only works when your co-collaborators also have access. Each issue of PresenTense Magazine is the product of over 70 young Jews – writers, editors, advisory committee members, and art team members – who work together through the creative process, from the initial brainstorming phase through the final production. Wave invites are a scarce commodity, and for 70 contributors, you need an allocation strategy. Google’s arbitrary approval process further baffled our editorial team.

Even with an approved Wave account, not all writers were as eager to ride the Wave as we had hoped. The great flexibility offered by the Wave platform belies the fact that Wave is – to many – unintuitive. It took significant effort for many writers and editors to learn such Wave basics as how to reply to a message, causing a great deal of frustration. Even those who persevered encountered a fair share of frustrations from frequent crashes, missing features, and various other unexplained occurrences. For those accustomed to working over e-mail and chat, the lack of integration with GMail meant many participants did not notice changes until days later.

Along the way we also came across some collaboration-enhancing perks. When posting in real-time, one author and a commenter discovered they were able to have a brief exchange of ideas inside the Wave and then delete all but what they wanted to preserve for others to see. Another pair of authors were able to “meet” each other and converse when they bumped into each other on their articles’ section contents page.

PresenTense Magazine is generally published as a glossy, in-print magazine. One of our defining features has been our full-color photographs and artwork, skillfully laid out alongside articles and other content. Wave does offer the ability to drag-and-drop images into an article, and you can even view them as a slideshow or one at a time as full-screen images. However, inside a “blip” the images appear as either small icons or full-size images taking up most of the page, and it’s not possible to wrap the surrounding text around them. The unsatisfying formatting was further complicated by Google’s mysterious rules governing whether and how blips are indented, depending on where exactly one clicks and whether one selects edit or reply.

PresenTense Magazine is the foundation for a vibrant community. Over the past five years, our ten in-print issues have acted as a community organizing tool, bringing together hundreds of young Jews around the world with ideas and enthusiasm about the future of Jewish innovation. However, there are challenges inherent in grassroots work with young Jews spanning time zones around the world. The geographic distances involved provide the tremendous benefit of enabling us to incorporate different perspectives and start conversations that may never occur otherwise. But it can be difficult to find appropriate online collaboration tools that have all the functionality we need. We found a lot to like on Google Wave, and we look forward to future improvements to the medium.

Deborah Fishman is Managing Editor of PresenTense Magazine.

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from Mashable:

The Future of the Non-Profit Internet

Earlier this month, Pew Internet released its annual Future of the Internet report. The survey of 900 leaders forecasts the future direction of online media. In turn non-profit strategists can glean insights into the future, and how to steer their individual programs.

This year’s research report dove into five critical areas. Here’s what non-profits need to take away from the Pew report for their efforts:

1. Google Changes the Way We Think;
2. The Internet Changes Language;
3. The Pundits Don’t Know What They’re Talking About;
4. The Internet Will Remain End-to-End – Sort Of;
5. Anonymity and Privacy Will Continue to Be Big Issues.

… “The report’s findings reflect the notion that the tools are not going to change much in the near future, but organizations need to change in order to use them better,” said author Allison Fine. “Rethinking how they operate, what they are trying to accomplish by connecting with people, is critically important for non-profit organizations to successfully engage through the social web.”

Read the complete blog post, or the Pew report in full.

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If you are thinking of utilizing the services of an Israeli web designer, here are a few things to consider.

from Smashing Magazine:

Shalom! Showcase Of Web Design In Israel

Much like many of Israel’s cities – hastily built and functional, yet poorly planned – such is the unfortunate state of most of the country’s websites. Most Israeli websites look unfinished, and they probably are. And Hebrew being a right-to-left language doesn’t help! Being victims of circumstance, Israeli Web designers cannot unleash their creative potential to make modern, usable working websites.

Even though some cutting-edge technologies are being developed right here in Israel – which is home to former hot startups such as ICQ (which became AOL messenger) and Intel (which is inside your machine… have a look!) – most business owners still putter around in IE6. Israel opened its first official Mac store only last year.

… In a 62-year-old country that is in a constant state of war, where every citizen has to join the army at the age of 18, efficiency (not to be mistaken for productivity or effectiveness) is almost sacred. It has been the most important quality in building this country, and it tends to be the most valued quality in any project. One could say, “It doesn’t matter if it’s good, as long is it works…” Sort of… Close enough. Thus usability, aesthetics and trends are ignored quite often, making the job of the designer secondary.

Another side effect of this harsh efficiency-driven attitude is the de-emphasis on a proper technological education. Because clients only demand that things “work,” standards, trends and aesthetics are the last thing on a developer’s mind. In turn, clients lack a real understanding of the media, which is why so many Israeli websites use Flash. The lack of variety of supported Hebrew Web fonts is also a factor. But fortunately SEO is creeping in and forcing even the most stubborn clients to ditch Flash for HTML and to replace images with live text as much as possible, which will hopefully push typography awareness to the next level.

image: Israeli design at its best: ILook, an Israeli street-fashion blog. The text on the left side says: “Send me a good picture of a hipster and win 300 bottles of Maccabi beer”.

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Many charities see the internet as a way to communicate with the youth market, but it’s not just the young and hip who are online. Older donors are valuable and ignored at your peril, says Jonathan Waddingham, a Digital Strategist at JustGiving in London.

“It’s a fact that many charities rely on the ‘Dorothy donor’ demographic for support, yet they want to attract and recruit baby boomers and the nascent generation Y. In many cases they go online to find that younger demographic, assuming that only those under 35 will be on Facebook, Twitter and the rest. The internet is still seen, for some at least, as the playground of the young. Our experience shows that the opposite is true – older supporters are going online more and more.

At JustGiving, we wanted to find out more about a typical online donor to provide some insight into what they look like, how they behave and how they can be best served. We found that a significant proportion of donors were over 45, and that they gave the most money online. We surveyed people who donated to a fundraising page from August 2009 to January 2010. More than 5,200 online donors completed the survey and gave us a uniquely up-to-date pool of data to analyse.

Starting with age, the most popular age bracket for making a donation was the 25 – 34 year olds. But the 35 – 44 and 45 – 54 age ranges are not far behind. Interestingly though, the number of over-55s who took the survey was exactly the same as the 23-34 age bracket. So if you think that only the young donate online, you’re wrong.

For almost a third of the sample it was the first time they had made a donation online. However, 70 per cent of the 55 – 64 range had made a donation online before, showing that there’s no excuse for not asking older people to donate online. For most of them, it’s certainly not new anymore.

… Ofcom [in the U.K.] estimates that nearly two-thirds of adults who are over 55 carry out some sort of communication at least once a week on the web. After communications, the next most popular weekly activity for the over-55s (at 32 per cent) is transactions. The challenge is to make sure that that transaction is an online donation.

And to make that happen, you need to re-think how you communicate with older people online. Do you take simple steps like making it easy to adjust the text size on your website, and focus on meeting web accessibility standards? Or do you segment your online donors by age and ask for differing amounts? Have you researched other sites this older demographic visits, and do you advertise on them?

At JustGiving, we’re going to be exploring how we can provide targeted content for supporters based on non-intrusive data like their browser type, the time of day they are online or the sites they came from. Profiling and personalising online experience offer really great rewards.

Taking this further, does your marketing and communications strategy integrate online and offline? We’ve seen that people respond to email and conversations, so are your appeals easy to find? Since Google is so many people’s homepage, SEO and SEM are vital for making sure you attract this high value target audience.

Your most valuable donors are older, they are online and they donate online. But are you serving them well enough? If you don’t, someone else will.”

courtesy Civil Society Fundraising

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Charities need to be bolder and braver online

by Elly Woolston

The maturing of the online space has meant that we are increasingly finding comfort in tried and tested methods, rolled out time and time again. This often results in multiple brands using similar approaches to fish in the same shrinking ponds, and this should be a cause for real concern.

For charities this is especially concerning. As a sector, we have not on the whole been at the forefront of digital innovation although we have now embraced the breadth of opportunities the online world presents. However, for those charities not currently embracing bold and brave digital marketing, capturing the hearts and minds of the increasingly astute, demanding donors will be difficult. This would be a sad development for the charity sector, especially as it has been built on the lessons that consumer brands are only just getting their heads around. Charities are already capable of selling beliefs not benefits, being transparent, involving rather than informing, encouraging word-of-mouth by providing dinner table conversation starters, aligning donor values with their own and turning a consumer into an ‘armchair volunteer’ for lifetime value. Let’s face it, a little from many is worth more than a lot from a few.

The dynamic relationships that charity brands traditionally have with their donors gives them the ideal platform on which to build innovative ‘open’ campaigns, which Nita Rollins Ph.D. describes in ‘The Open Brand’ as being On-demand, Personal, Engaging and Networked. ‘Open’ is big, it’s bold, but it’s embraced only by brands which have the courage of their convictions. This makes it the ideal brand and communications architecture for charity brands, for what are they founded on other than convictions?

When considering any online activity, charities need to make their offering not only findable and accessible, but immediate. If they are to truly engage donors, content must be real-time and reflective of their needs and expectations. Interactivity in the digital space is becoming increasingly popular and for charities this is a great way to inspire donors and foster active and emotive relationships with them. Through embracing social media strategies, charities have a great opportunity in prompting donors to discuss and interact with their brand. Yes, some do already have Facebook pages and Twitter Feeds, but there is certainly room for improvement.

The issue most brands have with embracing this call for an ‘open’ campaign architecture is that they’re not bold enough to let go. As AG Lafley, CEO of P&G said, “Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation. We need to learn to let go.” Charities are going to have to face the challenge of giving back to donors, in the form of information, accountability and even giving donors some say in what the charity does. As Nike and Coke discovered, once you open a dialogue with your consumers they expect you to listen and take notice of what they say. Although for many charities this dialogue is already materialising online, others need to go with it instead of resisting the transparency the digital space expects of them.

Living and giving is increasingly becoming part of people’s lives, with thousands taking to the streets to raise funds through their own initiatives. Digital media is playing a crucial role in this evolution. Just Giving, for example, has transformed fundraising. It has allowed individuals to modernise fundraising to just a click while also creating talkability around charity initiatives. The site has set the standard for online fundraising and reflects the willingness of consumers to donate to charity if given a quick and easy option.

Digital doesn’t have to mean just online ads or social media, it’s about encapsulating the brand in the right way for the right audience. There are some great examples out there. Take the RNLI ‘Mystery Package’ campaign which proves that it’s as much about digital as direct, online as offline, cause as purpose, personal as social, and response as relationship. Ultimately, charities have to get by giving. At a basic level, when Dogs Trust asked its Facebook fans for £2 each on January 12th 2009 it received £1,000 within 24 hours. How do you calculate an ROI on an investment of nothing?

For those clients who ask – “Tell me something new?” or “What should I try to break the mould?” Or for those that want to pioneer and are bold enough to champion, let’s work with them to inspire, provide, promote, facilitate and nurture, not just ask.

Elly Woolston is Managing Director of DMS in the U.K.

courtesy: Brand Republic

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by Laura E. Kaufman

There is nothing scientific about this post. No studies were conducted, no metrics gathered.

I am simply sharing observations based on the experience of one donor: me.

This year, I did my year-end giving either partly or entirely on-line. I gave to multiple non-profits. They included local, national and international organizations. Some gifts were to grassroots projects and others to large, well-resourced non-profits. I used organization websites, and if I was less familiar with an organization, I checked their ratings on Charity Navigator.

More and more non-profits are using Web 2.0 to promote their cause and attract donors. However, simply establishing a website, Facebook page or tweeting is not enough. Non-profits need to keep their web presence current. If attracting supporters is a key goal of an organization’s web strategy, then each web location should be as donor-friendly as possible.

Most non-profits are already stretched to the limit personnel and time-wise. So what is a busy and overburdened non-profit professional to do?

If your organization does not have a clear social media strategy, this would be a good place to start. It’s a new year. Plan to spend some time setting realistic goals for how you will use social media this year, and then secure the resources (people, time, quality content) to do this well.

Good planning takes time. But my experience reminded me that there are several simple (and often free or low-cost) steps that non-profits can take to make a prospective online donor’s experience with your organization as donor-friendly as possible. These are the ideas that came to mind as I was donating on-line:

1. Your website: Has anyone in your organization ever tried to give on-line to your organization? How would they rate the experience? Is it easy to navigate to the donation page from your home page? Do you have a “donate now” button on each page?

• Some of the websites I visited only linked to the donation page from their home page. If I was on another page, I found it aggravating to navigate back to the home page to give a donation.
• Some websites I surfed looked as if they had not been updated for years. This may lead a donor to wonder if your non-profit is well-run or if you are even still in business.

2. Your donations page:

• Several organizations failed to offer me the opportunity to print the donations page and submit it – with a check – via snail mail. Some of us still like to write checks. We look at your website to get information about your work, and then give via the US Mail. If you think this might apply to your donors, make it easy for them to do so.
• There was large variation in suggested giving levels, even for non-profits of similar size and budget. Some sites listed $100 as the top gift choice and then added an “other” check box. Other sites listed their top gift as $500 or even $1,000. One site did not list any suggested amounts at all. How did you arrive at the suggested gift amounts posted on your donations page? Are these amounts based on analysis of your average gift size on-line and on strategies to increase your average gift size? Have you ever tested other ways of listing donation levels to see if they increase the size of your average on-line gift?

3. Organization Contact Information: Is your organization’s address on your donations page? Is it easy to find? Several times I wanted to check an organization’s website, download a donation form and give offline. But, I often had trouble locating the organization’s mailing address and had to search out “contact Us” pages and navigate away from the donations page.

Donors expect on-line giving or even on-line research of organizations to be easy. If I were a little less determined, I might have given up at several of the sites I visited and donated to another organization. Is your website as easy and donor-friendly as it can be?

There are certainly other easy fixes non-profits can apply to their online giving system, but this list provides a good starting point. What are some of your ideas?

Laura E. Kaufman is the immediate past Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Foundation of Chicago.She currently consults on effective strategies for raising funds as the Principal at Partners in Effective Philanthropy and blogs at Change 4 Your Dollar.

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Tamar Snyder writing in The Jewish Week:

Mobile phone giving has hit a tipping point, says Lucy Bernholz, a longtime adviser to philanthropic foundations who is also a well-respected blogger and analyst of philanthropic trends. Among Jewish organizations, the American Jewish World Service and the JDC are among the first to try their hands at mobile giving campaigns, while the UJA-Federation of New York has launched the Chai Society, which enables recent college graduates to donate $18 a month to the UJA by texting the word “Chai” to 58126.

The question is how successful these campaigns are and whether other Jewish organizations, especially those not involved in disaster relief and recovery efforts, will jump on the bandwagon, as well.

… Currently, only 500 of the more than one million U.S. nonprofits are running text-to-donate campaigns, but [Douglas] Plank [CEO of Mobile Cause] envisions a large increase in the coming year. “The heightened awareness of mobile giving has caused nonprofits that support Haiti and those that don’t to realize that this is a viable fundraising tool that they need to start using,” he says.

One of the barriers to launching a mobile giving campaign is the assumption that it’s more difficult to use than it is. “With just a few clicks, you can initiate your campaign,” says Plank. “They’re often unaware of how easy it is from the perspective of the nonprofit.”

… For the JDC, establishing a mobile giving campaign is part of an effort to attract young donors and show that a “95-year-old very established organization is getting out there and working with new technology,” [Sarah] Eisenman [JDC’s director of next generation and service initiative] says. “We’re adapting to how people live and how they communicate and opening up as many entry points as possible,” she says. “That can only be a positive.”

… Still, there are downsides to mobile giving campaigns, including the fear that potential donors will ease their conscience with a quick $10 text donation and not bother to give a larger gift.

That presents a dilemma to organizations like the AJWS, where the average online gift is between $100 and $115. While the organization is experimenting with a text-to-donate campaign to benefit the Haiti relief efforts (text “AJWS” to 25383), it has opted not to publicize its texting number on its Web site. “If we encouraged people to text, it’s $10. If they’re already on the donate page, why would we shoot ourselves in the foot?” says Riva Silverman, AJWS’s director of development. The point of the mobile giving campaign, she says, is to get to people who otherwise wouldn’t go to your Web site to donate.

The Haiti earthquake has indicated that more and more donors are heading online to donate. During the tsunami, half of the gifts came in online and half came “the old-fashioned way,” says Silverman. “And people were really nervous about giving more than $1,000 online.” Fast forward to present day. The organization has raised more than $5 million for the Haiti relief effort, and three quarters of donations came through the AJWS Web site. In addition, online gifts included a number of $2,500; $5,000 and even $10,000 donations. “It really shows how things have shifted,” she says.

… For the past three years, the UJA’s “Generosity” event for Jewish philanthropists in their 20s and 30s has featured donor pledge technology that enables attendees to text their pledges from their cell phones, along with messages honoring the honorees, which are then broadcast on multiple screens around the room.

“Our research has shown that younger people tend to think that we’re their grandparents’ charity,” says Michelle Waranach, director of Emerging Leaders and Philanthropists at the UJA. “This sends the message that we’re cutting edge and technologically savvy.” The text-to-pledge technology has replaced traditional pledge cards, which is an added plus for the environmentally conscious. Of the 600 people who attended Generosity in January, more than one-third contributed via text-to-pledge, in addition to the $180 ticket price. The amounts ranged from $10 to $6,500, and contributed to 40 percent of gross profits, according to the UJA.

The UJA requires attendees to list their cell phone numbers when they sign up for Generosity, which is crucial for tracking and following up on pledges. A major concern with mobile giving is the difficulty of tracking donors and establishing long-term relationships with them. “We see disaster gifts as entry points to the AJWS,” says Silverman. “We’ll send an e-mail thanking donors for coming to us to give to Haiti and share what we did in Haiti  – and then, let us tell you all about the rest of our work. You can’t do that with texting.”

“Online giving was the new technology for the tsunami, and clearly texting has become the new technology for this disaster,” Silverman says. Still, it hasn’t taken off for AJWS like it has for the Red Cross. “We don’t have Michelle Obama getting on TV every night telling Americans what number to text.”

excerpted from Will Mobile Giving Take Off In The Jewish World?; posted with permission

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