February 2, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
One of the big questions charities have about text-message giving is whether the $5 and $10 gifts donors make using their cellphones come at the expense of larger gifts those same people would have made online or in the mail.
In a new survey, more than 8 out of 10 people who made charitable donations via text message said they would consider making larger contributions using another method.
The report, however, is based on a relatively small group of donors.
In December, CCS, the fund-raising consulting company that conducted the research, sent a text message about the survey to more than 23,500 donors who had made a contribution using their cellphone and opted to receive follow-up messages from the charity to which they donated; 253 of those donors completed the survey.
The percentage of cellphone donors who choose to receive additional information varies, but is generally low.
Jenifer Snyder, executive director of the mGive Foundation, which commissioned the survey, said that for some campaigns the opt-in rate is less than 1 percent, while for others it can be as high as 20 percent.
The tight rules that largely protect cellphone users from receiving unsolicited text messages make it difficult to poll mobile donors, says Ms. Snyder.
“You can’t survey people who haven’t given you permission to communicate with them via text,” she says.
Ms. Snyder suspects that conducting the poll during the holiday season—the last two weeks of December—might be one factor for the small percentage of people who completed the survey.
Among the survey’s other findings:
- Nearly 80 percent of the respondents said that they had also made charitable contributions via mail or the Internet.
- Almost half of the people surveyed said they would like the option to give a $25 text donation. Currently the maximum gift size is $10. Nearly three-quarters of respondents reported that $25 was the maximum amount they would consider giving via text message, while 15 percent said $50 and 9 percent said $100 or more.
- More than 70 percent of respondents cited e-mail messages as a factor that motivated their text-message gifts. Other factors included public events (41 percent), television (37 percent), Facebook (35 percent), and friends and family (32 percent). Twitter was the least-cited factor, at 13 percent.
