That’s one of many bits of insight provided by Pew Research’s latest study of mobile giving, which looked in depth at text giving to the Haiti earthquake disaster in early 2010, and compared that to other (prior and subsequent) mobile and online giving.
What struck me was that 76% of the Haiti text givers said their text contributions are “usually a spur-of-the-moment decision”, whereas 45% say that about their online contributions. The surprise is not that text giving is quintessentially impulse giving … to me it’s that such a large percentage, 50%, say that they “usually do lot of research before donating” online. I would have expected online donations to also be more spontaneous.
This report has tons of valuable information …
- Haiti was the door-opener to text giving for fully 74% of donors who gave via that channel.
- However, nearly all of the 73% of Haiti text donors in this survey who belong to a group or organization, have made a monetary contribution to their group(s) in the past. In other words, most are established donors trying a new channel.
- Many of the Haiti text donors have given again via texting (56% to one of three specified disasters, and 29% to other causes).
- Mobile givers are more racially and ethnically diverse than the overall population of charitable givers. Whites comprise three-quarters (75%) of all charitable givers, but make up two-thirds (63%) of this sample of Haiti donors and just half (51%) of all text donors.
- 43% of text donors encouraged others to give, but 75% who did so encouraged others by talking face-to-face.
- After making their Haiti contribution, six in ten say they haven’t followed the ongoing reconstruction efforts (43% “not too closely” and 15% “not at all”). Here today, gone tomorrow.
There’s just too much in this ‘must read’ report to summarize here, including an interesting profile of text givers versus other givers, and a look at how text givers prefer to communicate with groups in which they are involved (surprises here).
Well done, Pew!
Tom
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“I would have expected online donations to also be more spontaneous.”
Seems to me that the degree of spontaneity has less to do with channel and/or mode of giving than it does gift amount. If a donor is prompted to give $5 he or she is much more likely to do so — regardless of channel — without research.
This is a particularly helpful post, Tom. Thanks. We have long been advising our clients to remember that the mobile channel is often engaging donors who typically would give in other ways — and that the cap on the mobile gift size (i.e. $5 or $10) can potentially downgrade a donor if great care is not taken to ensure that this channel is capturing an extra gift and not simply representing a channel shift. Hard data showing that most mobile givers are established donors, however, has been hard to come by. This is much appreciated.
Great post.
I’m working with lots of UK charities on their SMS and text to donate activity. The benefits to the potential donor are clear, they can give on impulse in seconds, no forms to fill in, no personal information to give away. They can take action in an instant.
An area that we plan to do lots more testing in, is repeat giving. Can we ask people whose name we don’t know, to give again by texting them appeals. If it works (early results say it will) we will have to change our entire way of thinking about how we segment and target donors for repeat donations. We will have databases full of anonymous donors – which will be very exciting and maybe a little scary for old school direct marketing fundraisers.
I blogged more thoughts here http://degregoriopaul.blogspot.com/2011/10/mobile-for-individual-giving.html
However, not a big money maker or money you can count on unless you have a disaster and get lots of press coverage.
I would like to see a study of ABC’s Hunger at Home series that netted very little in the way of text donations even though it was pushed for several days.
While it’s a great way to make short term money from people who you will probably never see again, I’m not sure how one “plans” to raise money from texting or how lucrative it can be. I’m still sticking with traditional ways of raising money, with online being the icing on the direct mail cake.