Why Mobile Matters for Fundraisers

Additional tips
Orkin provided some additional tips.

Advice for smaller organizations that have barely tapped in to mobile: “Depending on your organization and goals, 1. the mobile Web gives you a whole new platform for communicating; 2. SMS — once you’re running in SMS, you have flexibility, it’s cheap, can be personal, immediate and very nimble. Apps are expensive and take time, so start out with the mobile Web and SMS.”

On integration: “We take an integrated view with mobile. It’s a marketing tool, a way of engaging with donors. It builds brand. We do expect it to do more work for fundraising and expect it to help us deliver our mission of services. We would like to coordinate with texts across all platforms. If you think of mobile as just one entity, you go down the silo.”

On fitting mobile to scale: “You have to scale your program and find the right provider that matches your needs and audience. You can’t have a fundraising lens on it. The cost per dollar is too high. It’s a communication tool. You can step down to a pretty small scale that’s affordable and fits your needs. And something as simple as a text message can trigger higher responsiveness in other channels.”

On the difference between ACS’ mobile site and main website: “Our main site has 10,000 active pages, a big CMS, lots of content. Our mobile site is designed for mobile-user behaviors and focused on certain deep content areas that match mobile behaviors.”