April 26, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
Mobile text giving, if used improperly, could result in the loss of committed donors for anonymous, one-time, low-dollar gifts, Jeff Brooks, a nonprofit consultant, writes in a column for this month’s FundRaising Success magazine.
The American Red Cross raised around $30-million in text-message gifts in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, prompting a surge of nonprofit groups, large and small, to quickly begin text-to-give fund-raising efforts.
Mr. Brooks says that, although text giving has its benefits in that it is a quick way to raise funds, those funds are being given by young people who are not yet donors and unlikely to make future contributions.
“If you pushed just one person to give via mobile who otherwise would have given by any other medium, you lost a rather large bunch of money,” says Mr. Brooks. “I have to wonder how many of those 300,000-some text donations that went to the Red Cross could have been $90 Web gifts from people who might give again some day.”
This is not to say that nonprofit groups should turn a blind eye to text giving says Mr. Brook. The new fund-raising tool is still developing and the limitations of today are likely to change, he says.
