Q-and-A With Michael Kondratick, Director of Grassroots Advocacy, JDRF

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), the largest charitable funder and advocate of type 1 diabetes research, recently launched a mobile-marketing campaign that uses wireless technology to enhance communication with and generate involvement from its advocates across the country. Called DiabeTXT, the program sends information to JDRF constituents via text messages, alerting them about important legislation news, diabetes research news and upcoming events.

We recently caught up with Michael Kondratick, director of grassroots advocacy for JDRF, to talk with him a bit about how the program is working and what he sees for its future.

FundRaising Success: When did your organization decide to use mobile technology?
Michael Kondratick: We've been experimenting with text messaging for [about] six months. We've started here in the advocacy program as a way to pilot the technology, to try to gauge how our audience would respond to it and then make the decisions further on on how we wanted to expand its use. So for the six months we've been working on it, it's been focused on its advocacy efforts. Although here and there we've tested in some broader JDRF venues.