Determining the Fundraising Benefits of Mobile Apps

You can get apps on your smartphone to manage your life, help you select the right wine for a meal, make photos of your friends look like aliens and check your flight details; one even claims to help you burn body fat by holding the phone against your stomach and making it vibrate.

But has anyone yet come up with an app that helps nonprofits raise more money? A major impediment to fundraising on iPhones and iPads — still the market-leading mobile devices — is that Apple refuses to allow donations to be made from apps. So at the point of taking gifts, apps have to direct users to websites, and nonprofits have to risk potentially losing the would-be donors' attention in the process.