Mobile Phone Fundraising Redux

I’m still in the holidaze, so today is another quick post.

mGive, which helps nonprofits raise money using SMS (mobile phone texting) has announced that in 2008 nonprofits using its service generated some $500,000.

Sound underwhelming?

Well bear in mind four things:

• While mGive had a soft rollout in February 2008 with a Super Bowl campaign for the United Way, the service wasn’t publicly available until April 2008.
  
• As the mGive press release points out, the first year of online nonprofit donations back in 1997, only generated $300,000 in donations. In 2007 online giving was in excess of $10.4 billion.
  
• Mobile phone penetration has higher penetration than either cable television or the Internet.
  
• Finally, in Europe and Asia, where this type of giving is commonplace, cell phone fundraising generated in excess of $100 million for tsunami relief in 2007.
  

This is a fundraising technique with a lot of room to run in 2009 and beyond.