A New York Charity Adds a Technology Twist to Its Holiday Appeal

City Harvest, a charity that helps feed the hungry in New York, is banking on both high- and low-tech innovations to persuade more people to give this year.

The charity’s ads, which appear on bus shelters and telephone kiosks and in print publications, display a new feature that makes it easy for people to use their mobile phones to donate to City Harvest or get more information. At the bottom of each ad is a QR or “quick response” code, which looks like a bar code.

QR codes allow people to point their phone at the code and get more detailed information about City Harvest on their mobile screen. They can learn more about the organization’s work or give money to the group.

Heather Wallace, City Harvest’s director of marketing, says that QR codes offer distinct advantages over text-message donations, largely because people can give as much as they want; text donations are limited by most cellphone carriers to just $5 or $10. Another advantage is that City Harvest can capture donors’ contact information with QR codes; text-message donations are collected by the cellphone carriers so charities can’t easily get information about donors.

To encourage as many people to use the QR codes as possible, she says, City Harvest is placing its year-end ads only in places that make it easy to scan the QR codes rather than on the sides of buses, subway cars, and other moving targets where the group has advertised before.

City Harvest is trying another new technique this year: Instead of featuring a needy person or impoverished family, each ad has a photo of a donor or a group of contributors and explains what their money accomplished. Each ad explains how the charity, which rescues perishable food, puts donations to use.

“We often have people ask us why we need money when we accept free food,” says Patricia Barrick, City Harvest’s vice president of external relations. “We wanted our ads to answer that question.”