INTERVIEW: Mobile Giving Foundation, Jim Manis, CEO
At the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles, I got the opportunity to speak with Jim Mannis, Chairman and CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation (MGF). The MGF gives wireless users a simple and immediate way to receive and respond to appeals from worthy causes with the donation charged back to the carrier bill and 100% of the donation going to the designated charity. Their recent announcement of linking more than 350 Non-Profit Organizations to receive micro-donations ($5 or $10) through PSMS.
In 18 short months, the MGF has generated more than a million U.S. dollars in donations for its 350 registered charities in the U.S., and recently launched the Mobile Giving Foundation Canada to support Canadian charities.
Source: Mobile Giving Foundation
How It Works
Consumers text a keyword that corresponds to a specific non-profit or charitable cause to a designated short code. Upon texting the keyword to the short code, a micro-donation of $5 or $10 is made and processed. The wireless service companies collect donations through their regular monthly billing process and remit those funds to the MGF. One-hundred percent of the donation is passed through to designated charitable causes.
“Mobile giving is a terrific concept that has helped hundreds of non-profits raise significant, sometimes organizationally transforming amounts of money, to help the recipients of their programs and services,” said Jim Manis, Chairman and CEO, Mobile Giving Foundation. “We want to educate non-profit organizations and the public about the power of mobile, especially as we head into the peak holiday giving period.”
Donations on Mobile
According to Manis, the key to the success of the MGF’s work is the carriers, which have graciously enabled the MGF to use their networks for premium-billing services. “We have worked with virtually all of the wireless service providers in the U.S. and Canada to establish pay-out agreements at 100 percent of each donation,” added Manis. “Clear standards have been designed to provide a quality user experience and a trusted source of donor engagement for non profits.”
“The idea is to get lots of people, in particular younger people, the ability to donate in small increments and reach those who are interested in giving to specific causes,” said Manis. “We learned from our experience from Natural Disaster Aid Relief in the US some years back that this could be a viable model in the broader sense for donations and charities.”
The shift is evident and mentioned the example of the recent U.S. Presidential Campaign where Obama asked for people to donate in small increments. This proved to be the “pot of gold” with millions of micro-donations flooded in and being put towards the campaign.
To speed up time-to-market for charitable giving programs, the MGF established the industry’s only campaign-launch processes that are based on existing shared short codes that have reduced provisioning times from as high as eight weeks to a low of five days in many cases. At the end of 2008, the MGF had set up 85 active campaigns on the MGF platform. Today, there are more than 400 active campaigns working at multiple price points of either $5 or $10 donations, including the capability to offer information opt-in based text alert packages as part of that donation to help the donor maintain visibility to the causes they support. Each week, the MGF launches up to 20 new campaigns. Response rates for these campaigns range from 1.5 percent up to a staggering 63 percent, depending on variables such as the cause, celebrity endorsement, co-branding affiliations and related marketing efforts.
