Case Studies: Mobile Fundraising and Advocacy Successes

With that in mind, MSF embarked on another MMS campaign: Text a Coffin Away. See the video below.

Video messages were sent and people were asked to donate to help save lives and take coffins away. The response was fast and furious: MSF exceeded its fundraising goal for the week in the first two hours of the campaign.

SMS activists
Another organization that has had success with mobile is Amnesty International. The human rights organization wanted to use mobile to add a sense of urgency, generate recurring donations, reach out to the masses, leverage activists’ social networks and create engagement. So it created a viral video to recruit SMS activists. See the video below.

The video has the sound of text messages coming in in the background, and as each message comes in, the man who is torturing the prisoner cannot harm him. The idea was to show the donor that her SMS is making a difference, Oscarson said.

The end of the video then encourages people to “Save lives with an SMS. Send Activist Start and your name to 72900.” Those who opted in then were taken to the mobile site for registration, where they could “log in to see their account, see what kind of donations you want to make, read about what’s going on, etc.,” Oscarson said.

The mobile site was used as a hub for information … and a hub for action. On the mobile site, Amnesty asked people for one-time donations, to sign protests and to share the message via social media. For instance, you could send a text as a signature for a protest. Those text “signatures” then were printed and handed to embassies as physical protest sheets, making for an easy way for supporters to sign petitions.

Further, the mobile actions were integrated instantly to Facebook, the mobile site and the Amnesty International website to target a larger, broader audience — generating donations, engagement and cultivating relationships.