Mobile

In terms of fundraising, nonprofits are limited to sharing images embedded with keywords and short codes on Instagram. For cause awareness, Instagram is a highly engaged community. Your nonprofit will likely receive more Instagram likes than Facebook likes and Twitter retweets combined, and it’s a community that is very responsive to nonprofits and images and videos that foster social good.

At World Wildlife Fund, we’ve seen an explosion in mobile visitors over the past three years, and I’m betting that you’ve experienced the same. We want to make sure we can provide these supporters with the content they are seeking, no matter what device they are using.  Thinking “mobile first,” we’ve focused optimizing our marketing efforts in these three key areas: website, email and SMS.

Here is a mobile and social fundraising success checklist excerpted from "Mobile for Good: A How-To Fundraising Guide for Nonprofits" by Heather Mansfield, founder and principal blogger at Nonprofit Tech for Good. By reading the book and implementing the steps necessary to launch a comprehensive mobile and social fundraixsing plan — and checking off the must-do items as you go along — your nonprofit will have in place mobile and social fundraising plan flexible enough to adjust to rapid changes in fundraising and communication technology that will occur over the next decade.

If your organization’s messages aren’t getting read, your constituents aren’t engaging. And if they aren’t engaging, they probably aren’t donating. Our quick check of nonprofit emails in our inboxes suggests that the vast majority are not mobile-friendly.

Last month in her Navigating Off the Napkin blog for FundRaising Success, data maven Angie Moore confessed to being completely confused by QR (quick response) codes. Moore … and a lot of other people, if we’re being honest. Following are some of the comments the post attracted.

Hear about the data and see how today’s technology makes going mobile easy, secure and very good for your bottom line.

A new app for streaming music service Spotify wants people to donate to charity in return for getting their favorite songs played during friends’ parties. The Guilty Pledgers app requires party hosts to sign in using Facebook, then open up a party playlist. Friends can then pledge to any of a range of charities — more than 13,000 available on the JustGiving website — in return for adding tracks of their choice to the playlist. It’s the first fundraising app to be launched on Spotify.

This year the Academy Awards featured a tribute to the classic and beloved film "The Wizard of Oz," in honor of the movie’s 75th anniversary. We think there is something everyone can learn from Oz … even about mobile fundraising! Here are a few famous lines from the classic movie and how we think you can apply them to your mobile program.

I know I'm supposed to think QR codes are great, but really I am just confused about them.

Ted Hart speaks with Philip King, vice president of mobile and business development at Sheads & Associates, a Cornerstone Co., about mobile fundraising on his Nonprofit Coach radio show.