Interactive Fundraising: 2010 Ushers in Faster Reaction Time for Fundraising
After Haiti, many thousands of individuals created online fundraising pages for relief organizations, which they e-mailed to their friends, posted to their Facebook accounts and tweeted to their Twitter followers. Having online fundraising pages for individuals and corporations that are willing to help is becoming a simpler and more important thing to consider as part of any online fundraising strategy. Citizen fundraisers provide many additional points of contact with donors.
The role of mobile
Mobile always has had great potential when it comes to fundraising, but it has been largely unrealized. The promise of mobile giving emerged in the wake of Haiti. The Red Cross TXT-to-Give program was well-promoted and generated a significant amount of mobile-based donations. There also were reports of non-text-based smart-phone giving programs that generated higher average donations than their text-based counterparts but resulted in far fewer donations and less money raised overall. Also, not all organizations had the apparent success that the Red Cross did with text-to-give donations. Much of the success of these programs depends upon the promotion. The full potential of mobile is still yet to be realized, but these success stories help to illuminate the path.
Apply these lessons to your organization
The lessons here are particularly apparent after a disaster like the one in Haiti, but they will also apply to normal, day-to-day online fundraising for just about any organization. The time from information to action will continue to decrease, and friction will be removed from the fundraising process. New ways will emerge for you to reach and enable individual and corporate supporters to help, and mobile will play an expanding role in fundraising. No doubt there will be still other valuable lessons learned about online fundraising in the aftermath of Haiti that will shape the future of fundraising.
Mark Sutton is president of Artez Interactive, U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @marksutton
