As the holidays approach nonprofits are working extra hard to raise money for their organizations.  The Denver Post just ran an article on texting for donations and cites the recent success the Red Cross experienced raising funds for victims of the earthquake in Haiti. The Red Cross raised  more than $26 million from 1 million donors in nine days.  The article says “forty percent of the donors that are giving through mobile are unique nontraditional donors that have never communicated with the nonprofit they just gave to before” this is according to Jenifer Synder, executive director of the mGive Foundation.  mGive provides text donation services to nonprofits for a fee.  mGive assigns a keyword and short code to your organization or campaign.  Each donation is charged to the user’s cell phone bill.  mGive collects the donations from cell phone providers and distributes the funds to your organization.

mGive is featuring their Salvation Army campaign; using a special ring tone – that mimics the familiar bells used with Salvation Army Red Kettles – that you receive when you text “Bell” to “50555” to donate.  This is a first year the Salvation Army has tried obtaining donations via texting and will serve as a test for future mobile campaigns.

A Guidestar Report released today points to social media as the number one challenge facing nonprofits in the coming year.  Social media covers social networking, blogging, and micro-blogging.  Facebook is clearly the big gorilla in the social networking world. Over 30,000 nonprofits are using Facebook Fan pages to engage their supporters and recruit new supports, and spread their message.  Facebook has surpassed Google as the number one most visited website and claims over 500 million users.  Facebook’s Causes application uses the social networking platform to recruit supporters, spread the word, and raise money as Facebook friends encourage each other to participate in causes they care about. 

Bloggers and blogging are still gaining readership and the Report anticipates that “there will be 26.2million bloggers and 112.7 million blog readers by the end of 2010 – accounting for 51% of all Internet users”.  And micro-blogging – micro-feeds like the ones shared on Twitter – continue to grow as well and there is no anticipated slowing of growth in 2011.

Social Media is here to stay – how will your organization leverage this technology?

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Blog by Joyce