Why do you think the appeal to donate to Haiti by texting has been so successful?

It was a powerful message replicated across all communication platforms for the benefit of major charities. Texting provides an immediate way for a person to respond. It’s a powerful medium to take action.

Its success builds on a few factors. Mobile giving reaches an addressable audience of 260 million cell phone users. As a country, we send billions of text messages a year. The technology has become ubiquitous. Because of the work we’ve been doing, the infrastructure and technology were in place when the earthquake struck Haiti, and agreements were pre-negotiated with the carriers. And the billing aspect is appealing because it doesn’t require the use of a credit card.

Hasn’t this technology been around for a while? What has changed since the tsunami in 2004?

When the Asian tsunami hit, two things were relatively new:Shortcodes only emerged at the end of 2002 and started as a way for brands to interact with customers; premium billing capability is even newer and came about in early 2004.

The vision for the Mobile Giving Foundation came through the initial response to the Asian tsunami. People at various wireless companies got together by phone at 11 a.m. one morning and by 5 p.m. we had a campaign across carriers. For those working in the industry, this feels better than trying to sell text alert packages.

After selling my company m-Qube, I wanted to establish an infrastructure for every day charitable giving.

Do you think mobile giving appeals to a younger generation of donors?

No doubt about that. One of the reasons nonprofits are interested in mobile giving is that it gives them access to a younger demographic that they have a hard time reaching. The demographic profile of mobile donors is assumed to skew heavily to the 18 to 21 crowd, which is valuable to nonprofits. They may give small today, but over a period of time may grow into more substantial donors. We’re currently putting research around that, trying to establish hard metrics.

Younger people like mobile giving because it’s a technology that’s familiar and it provides immediate satisfaction. In our research, one phrase we heard over and over was that “they felt empowered.”

What’s been the impact of social media on the success of text giving?

Social media had a strong impact, especially in the first 24 hours after the Haitian earthquake. There’s a period of huge emotional pull, which social media accelerates. We were able to go live with our mobile giving campaigns within two hours. Facebook and Twitter helped the campaigns go viral.

Does this success represent a sea change for mobile giving?

Yes, it has had an accelerating effect on making consumers more comfortable with text giving and on generating more interest from nonprofits. Before the earthquake, we were servicing more than 400 organizations. Since the disaster, we have added more than 23 charities specific to Haiti relief.

Mobile giving is attractive to nonprofits because of three elements: acquisition of new donors, fundraising and donor engagement—nonprofits can ask donors if they want more information, and, for instance, send them a link to their Web site.

What types of campaigns are most successful?

In our experience, mobile giving doesn’t work equally well for everybody. Response rates vary. The type of cause makes a difference. Campaigns that try to raise funds for capital construction, for instance, may only get a 1.5 percent participation rate, whereas campaigns that have a service element are a lot more successful. Text giving has a very immediate response, so it’s perhaps not surprising that more emotional appeals work best.

What are the costs to the nonprofit?

One-hundred percent of donations are given to the nonprofit. The only direct charge from the Mobile Giving Foundation to the charity is a $350 application fee.

Fees charged by the mobile marketing companies we work with vary. It depends on what the nonprofit needs. Do they want a sophisticated campaign that’s integrated with an online campaign, requires technology acquisition, database management or Web widgets? That adds to the cost. On average, the total fee structure is 6 to 7 percent. In emergencies, some mobile marketing companies will waive the fees.

What have been the biggest challenges to establishing the Mobile Giving Foundation?

Like any startup working toward a vision, everything can be a challenge. We had to resolve technical issues with the carriers and eliminate their typical 50 percent revenue share. We had to raise awareness among nonprofits and needed to explain how to use this as a fundraising tool. We had to reassure consumers worried about security and breach of confidentiality. Organizationally, we had to figure out how to raise enough money for the services we provide.

Why did you choose to locate the company in Bellevue?

I live in Redmond, so it was a matter of convenience. Some of the benefits to being in the area are that it is close to many wireless assets including AT&T and T-Mobile. There are many leaders and pioneers in the wireless and nonprofit industries in this area as well.

For more on the Mobile Giving Foundation, visit http://www.mobilegiving.org

Read all Startup City profiles.

Images: Startup City logo by Michelle Walls. Photograph of Jim Manis courtesy of the Mobile Giving Foundation.

Peter Luyckx is the Managing Editor at Flip the Media. Recently, he worked as a Web Producer and Editor at Microsoft’s MSN Health & Fitness and MSN Shopping (now Bing). He co-founded and published the environmental newsletter The Frugal Environmentalist. He is a graduate student in the MCDM program and can be followed on Twitter @ peterlux.

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I bet you can see your mobile phone right now. While you’re at a computer — with the world at your fingertips — your phone is your crutch, it’s in your pocket, in your sights, within reach at all times. It’s your connection to your son that’s away at college, your wife that’s in Italy on business. You know they aced the test, went shopping and ate chocolate mousse for dessert.

You’re in the club, but, then, I’m sure you have been for a while. The club of being always on. Always connected, always in the know. I hope you’re happy. This is the end of anticipation.

The term, as far as I can tell, was first presented in Naomi Baron’s book Always On. Because of mobile phones, not to mention the internet, we spend increasingly less time “away” from each other. Even if that time being together is virtual, we need not wait days for a letter to arrive (or take the time to write said letter) or wait until we reunite in person to share the momentous — or minuscule — details of our lives.

The sharing of our lives via mobile technology — particularly simple, speedy text messages — enables us to live with each other, without living near each other. We are never alone, never far from our family and friends, even if they span the globe.

So, does absence make the heart grow fonder? If I refrain from mobile communication with my pals and family, will I miss people/appreciate people/look forward to visits home more?

Nah. Rather than supplanting face-to-face communication, mobile communication lets us pick up where the text discourse left off. And visa versa.

Will it redefine the way we handle relationships and our in-person encounters? You betcha. We’re still humans. We still crave being around other humans, especially those that we actually enjoy: those that send us the most texts. Rather than pouring over the last three months of our lives, leaving out the silly details we’d forget three months later that seemed funny/important/relevant at the moment a text was sent, we can rehash, ask detailed questions, relive the moments we witnessed via mobile. Mobile communication makes our lives, if we so choose, more intimate than ever before.

Does being constantly on, always connected, living with those that are who-knows-how-far-away from us have its consequences? Most def. We have less time for our own thoughts if we’re always fiddling and wasting time on our mobiles instead of soaking in our own thoughts. And, in those moments we are face-to-face with those we haven’t seen in a week, a month, a year, we’re likely to be fiddling with the phone still. This is the dance the mobile phone has choreographed for society, and so many of us fall in line for it.

I’m on my phone. A lot. It’s my favorite time-waster while I’m commuting and so long as I use it for good (living with my friends from afar), and not for evil (distracting my listening abilities from real humans), I’m okay saying I can’t live without it.

Originally posted on Midwest by Northwest.

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The review quotes linguist Crystal as writing “I don’t think I have ever come across a topic which has attracted more adult antagonism.” I guess I’ll have to take that at face value. Personally I’ve seen (and perhaps even engaged in) a fair amount of mockery of texting, and by “texting” I specifically mean l33t, but most of the so-called adults I know reserve their real antagonism for the quavering histrionics that kids today call music. Which means nothing’s changed since the bobby soxers were listening to Frank Sinatra and tying up the telephone party line talking about the boys in the zoot suits with the drape shapes and the reet pleats. Adults will always complain about the music and slang of youth culture. Throw a new and unfamiliar medium into the mix, and I suppose the fogeys can take pleasure in ratcheting up their disapproval a notch or two.

According to Louis Menand, the reviewer, Crystal sees little threat to language from texting. Well, that’s a relief. But what I found more interesting was this paragraph from the review:

…texting is, partly, a game. It’s like writing a sonnet (well, sort of): the requirement is to adapt the message to immutable formal constraints. A sonnet can’t have more than fourteen lines, and a mobile-phone message can’t have more than a hundred and forty bytes, which is usually enough for a hundred and sixty characters. This is a challenge to ingenuity, not an invitation to anarchy.

For me, personally, texting was something I only did a few times before I got a real QWERTY keyboard, first on my Palm Treo 650 and now on my iPhone. Perhaps my problem is that I’m too attached to vowels and think numbers are best used for mathematical purposes. Or perhaps it’s because I lacked the patience or dexterity to learn to write with a numeric keypad. Whatever the reason, I almost always use complete words, if not complete sentences, in my texting.

The review also suggests texting may be contributing to the ongoing Englishification of the world’s languages. I’ve long suspected the adaptability of English in adopting from other languages is a key reason other languages now find themselves so easily adopting from English. But whether or not it’s a two-way street, there’s still something about this sentence which makes me wonder just how linguistically homogeneous the world will become:

Germans write “mbsseg” to mean “mail back so schnell es geht” (“as fast as you can”).

I’m not going to go out and buy the book, but I did enjoy the review, and certainly found parts of it rthr thot prvkng

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What I find most baffling is the result of a national study on the Internet and American Life by the College Board and Pew Project stating that 64% of the teenagers admitted to using Textlish (as it is being called) in their school writing.  That is horrible!  Though kids are now writing more frequently, the article mentions grammer is bad, spelling is incorrect, and punctuation is not even used at all. 

Maybe as a class we should initiate a online viral campaign for the preservation of formal, educational writing.  It could be a cool experiment.  Thoughts?       

-Corey

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