Internet, Email & Telephones > Email & Communication Services

Reaching Out Through Mobile

By Edward Mannsaker

An introduction to raising donations via text, communicating with your supporters and the benefits of text-based help lines.

 

Mobile phones present a vast opportunity for the Third Sector, both from a marketing and a service point of view. They are fast becoming the UK’s dominant communications tool, with UK penetration breaking 100% in 2005 (Analysys, May 2005)

That compares very favourably to the internet, which only reached 62.5% penetration in September 2006 (www.internetworldstats.com, 2006).

The potential scope for using mobile within the Third Sector is huge, and developing rapidly along with the pace of technology. This article will limit itself to text, the most widely used function of mobile outside of voice, and provide a little insight into three applications, each representing a different aspect of how mobile can be used: text to donate; call to action; and helplines. 

Text to Donate

The text to donate function is the obvious place to start when considering how charities can best make nuse of mobile. This type of function allows someone to send a text to a shortcode (five digit number) to have their donation either taken from their prepaid credit or added to their next bill depending on their contract, providing an easy to method of donation.

Impulse donations made easy

Importantly, incorporating text to donate in any advertising provides an immediately actionable means to donate, capitalising on the moment someone sees your communication. It is also a very straightforward process for donors to follow.

However, to fully understand the potential, it’s important to realise that twice as many people in the UK have a mobile phone as have a credit or debit card (www.mintel.com, 2006). Mobile shouldn’t be seen simply as a means to elicit impulse donations as it also extends the option of electronic donation to a far wider base.

Furthermore, although text to donate is normally considered with a focus on ad hoc donations, it can equally be applied to recurring donations. From a donor’s perspective what is easier: sending a text or filling in bank details on a form?

A nice twist on text to donate is to promote it as a raffle, donors sending texts to enter rather than purchasing tickets. This provides a far wider potential reach for such a fundraising project than traditional methods, as people can enter simply through being told about the competition rather than having to purchase a physical ticket. Accordingly such competitions can benefit from huge word of mouth promotion.

Drawbacks

There are certain drawbacks which can make donations over mobile less attractive. The predominant issue is that network operators do not currently recognise charities as any different from corporate concerns, and so subject charitable donations to the same revenue share model they would a commercial proposition. How much this share is depends on the network and the amount of the transaction, but on a £5 donation you would look to receive no more than 75% of the donated amount less tax.

Text to donate would look much more attractive were operators to offer charity rate shortcodes, taking less of a cut from donations. This is looking more likely as, despite the apparent unfairness, more and more charities introduce text donations into their fundraising mix.

Getting started

There are many companies which offer premium SMS mechanics, who will handle both the technical aspect of the service and the financial relationship with the networks. Several of which have online interfaces allowing real time tracking of campaigns.

Gift Aid

Text to donate is compatible with gift aid, and fairly neatly. When someone makes their donation by text they can be sent a message containing a clickable link which will take them to a WAP site (Wireless Application Protocol, internet sites designed for mobile phones). This type of message is called a WAP push. Once on the site the donor can complete an online form to register for gift aid.

This solution is effective but does require the building and hosting of a WAP site, an expenditure which is probably not justifiable for less wide reaching advertising.

Who’s already doing it?

As examples, these are just some of the charities currently offering donation by text:

Age Concern, Ataxia UK, Breast Cancer Care, British Dyslexia Association, Dogs for the Disabled, Down Syndrome Educational Trust, Eating Disorders Association, Gift to Nature, Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, Leukaemia Research, LifeSIGNS, MAG (Mines Advisory Group), Meningitis Research Foundation, MS Trust, National Literacy Trust, National Society for Epilepsy, Refuge, Women’s Aid and World Land Trust.

The early adopters may have been larger or medium-sized charities, but the function is being employed by a wide range and as more people become comfortable with the process its scope widens.

Sending messages

Text donations have the added benefit of database building, but of course mobile numbers can also be incorporated into any other data collection methods.

The strength of using mobile to communicate with supports is that most people leave their mobile phones if not permanently on then on for most of the time. This means that your base of supporters is always immediately contactable, whether it be to solicit further donations or contributions of time, or simply relay information.

Be sure not to be intrusive

A key difficulty with communicating with a base via mobile is that it can be perceived as highly intrusive if the messaging is not carefully handled. That said, working to a few simple rules should ensure this isn’t the case.

 

• Ensure that people are aware that providing their mobile number may result in them receiving text communications.
• If numbers are collected along with other data, say when a form is completed, then explaining clearly what it will be used for at this collection stage is straight forward. Fewer people will provide their numbers if they know they’re going to be contacted, but those that do will be happy with any future communications.

• Make it clear exactly how people can stop being contacted. The standard way for someone to stop unwanted promotional texts is by replying STOP to one.
  
  ICSTIS (the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of the Telephone Information Services) regulations require all communications to cease if someone sends STOP, although public awareness of this is limited.
  
  Regardless of compliance, informing someone how to stop receiving messages up front will make them far better disposed towards you and any future messages you send. This is especially important when considering data collected by a text to donate project, as here people may not have considered that their numbers would be used beyond the single donation. 

• Of course the best way to, as near as possible, guarantee that communications aren’t intrusive is to make them desirable. Hold off sending anything until you really have something to say

• Make sure the full impact of what you say isn’t lost when reduced to 160 characters (the limit for a text to guarantee it’s received on all models of handset)
• If possible make the communications useful, say with dates or a phone number which can be easily saved to the recipients phone.

How much will it cost?

The cost of sending a message varies depending on the volumes being sent, but is around the 5p mark. If the message is to be free for the recipient then this cost must be met by the sender.

Need it cost?

MT SMS messages (Message Terminating – a message which terminates on a handset rather than originating from one) can be premium, meaning that the person receiving one is charged. This is how commercial SMS alerts services are charged, as with news alerts or sports results services. Premium MT SMS provides a means of collecting donations from supports by sending an outgoing message rather than the donor sending the text themselves, as with text to donate.

Obviously you cannot simply send unsolicited messages to people in order to boost donations. To be ICSTIS compliant various rules must be kept, such as explaining how much will be charged and regularly allowing people to stop receiving messages. However, if your communications provide a useful service, charging could provide an additional revenue stream.

As with text to donate there are various providers of bulk SMS services, many of whom offer easy to use online interfaces. It’s worth shopping around, bearing in mind what sort of campaign or service you’re looking to run. There are no standard rates, with prices based on volumes and the amount of support you require.

Helplines

The idea of text-based helplines has been around for several years now, but with few working examples. Samaritans have established the most prominent text helpline service, offering a full befriending service over SMS.

There are many considerations with such a service, not least because of the limitation of message size; 160 characters severely restricts what can be said in one go, so texts need to be considered as more similar to lines in a conversation than to brief emails or leaflets.

It’s reasonable to say that the main logistical issue with such a service is how popular they could become. It’s hard to overestimate just how much text is currently used in UK: texts volumes are increasing month on month, reaching 3.8 billion in October 2006 (Mobile Data Association 2007); New Years Day 2007 saw a record breaking 214 million texts sent, almost 9 million per hour (Mobile Data Association 2007).

Reaching the unreachable

However text should not be dismissed as too troublesome given the benefits it brings. To understand the advantages of text it’s vital to appreciate the demographic it appeals to. Although text is used by a broad range of people, the heaviest of users are 16-24, a notoriously difficult demographic to reach and also an exceptionally vulnerable one.

Text also has the benefit of feeling less personal, more anonymous than other forms of communication, and so often feeling like a safer way of getting help. This is especially true for help of a personal or emotional nature where speaking one to one may feel like too big a step.

One such project, demonstrating what can be achieved on a smaller scale, is Child Text; a service set up in several secondary schools in Cardiff which allows children to report issues such as bullying via text. Unlike the Samaritans service, where ongoing support over text is offered, Child Text operates the text service as a first point of contact. This approach may limit the traffic generated and so make the service more manageable from an operational point of view.