Red noses and text messages
Howard Lake | 18 March 2015 | Blogs
One of the most brilliant things for me about Red Nose Day last Friday wasn’t the fantastic amount raised in one day (£78 million) or the £1 billion raised over the past 30 years, but it was the way in which Comic Relief brought to the fore text fundraising.
For many people, giving to Comic Relief is likely to have been their first experience of text donating. The advantages of well-known campaigns like this means that they can help advance fundraising considerably. They normalise giving methods that, even though they may be growing fast, are still new to many people and it opens them up to giving in that way again.
I should state up front that my organisation wasn’t involved with Comic Relief’s main campaign, but I am a fan. We recognise its importance in paving the way for so many other charities, large and small.
Text donations worth £150 to UK charities next year?
We’ve seen how one off charity donations and regular giving has changed over the last five years and text giving is rapidly growing. It’s predicted that text donations could raise as much as £150 million for charities next year, ten times more than in 2010.
Over the August bank holiday weekend last year, our system processed over 1 million transactions, raising £4.5 million for Macmillan as people threw iced water over their heads. Since last year’s Ice Bucket Challenge, the nomakeupselfie and the amazing Stephen Sutton response and other viral campaigns, many charities understood that they needed to be ready to take advantage of such initiatives in the future and they purchased short text codes or keywords in readiness. There is a natural pairing between social media and text giving, and a short code or keyword is so easy for the public to include in their messages.
Text giving to smaller charities?
But for many charities, particularly smaller organisations, that is about as far as they have ventured. Text giving remains new ground for them and it can seem intimidating, complex, and costly or only for those big guns who have big marketing agencies behind them. And for those that have maybe tried it in the past, some providers don’t hand back the donors’ data for the charity to utilise in their fundraising going forward, so really what’s the long-term gain?
But nowadays it doesn’t have to be expensive, it’s easy to set up and now you can ensure you obtain and own the data. With UK donors becoming increasingly mobile-savvy, if not reliant, this is the time to explore the possibilities of text; whether for recruitment, donor stewardship, campaigning or for many other purposes. You can be creative, you can make it a lot of fun, and you can build a valuable income stream; the opportunities are there to be grabbed.
From one-off gifts to regular giving
Recently, we’ve been working with a smaller charity embarking on their first donor recruitment campaign by text where donors would donate £3 to the charity via text, and immediately be sent a link to register their address on an online form and another via bounce back texts; neatly integrating text into their channel mix and building their donor-base.
Another project for a corporate charity partnership ran an X-Factor style competition for staff where individuals chose their own keywords and competed with one another to generate support and raise money. While we also helped a national charity to engage its supporters via text in signing a petition to free prisoners of war – not asking for a donation but capturing data and starting a dialogue… and a relationship.
Text has evolved becoming affordable and easy to use for charities, and because it’s possible to collect data it’s also possible to think beyond one-off text gifts to the realms of regular giving via the mobile phone bill.
With a little creative thinking a charity can make contact, gather donations and develop long term programmes of engagement with donors that are powerful touch points yet unobtrusive because there’s always a simple STOP opt-out in every message. You can set up your own keywords on a shared number with an infinite number of channels or sub keywords, and accept regular gifts by setting up monthly text donations with supporters.
With 37% of adults, and 60% of teenagers, all admitting they are addicted to their smartphones, it makes financial sense to encourage their donating habits through text giving. And for the donor it’s a convenient and simply easy way to give.
Iain Williams is a Director of InstaGiv.com which provides mobile giving solutions to charities big and small.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.