Integrating Religion and Mobile

October 12th, 2006 by Eric

Of some of the great brands and organizations, the Catholic Church is certainly large in membership and a well know group. While the two services that I am describing in this post do not directly work with the Catholic Church, they are definitely leveraging “faith” as an affinity group for services.

Catholic Mobile provides a way to stay in touch with your Christian faith, even outside the church. Their site states: “Catholic Mobile provides families and individuals with inspiring Catholic content that will enrich their daily wireless experiences.” For about $4.99/month you can get a daily message containing some of the following content: Mass Gospel, Saint of the Day, or Daily Prayer. Personally, I think it’s great that yet another content type has realize that mobile is one of many channels to appeal to its subscriber base. It certainly is a way to “stay in touch” with your faith in between going to church. Religion, in my humble opinion, is a highly personal thing, thus much like your mobile device is a great way to pair the two together.On the other hand, much like Internet dating, receiving the Gospel, Psalms, and other inspriational messages is not that appealing to share amongst your friends. But nevertheless, embracing the technology and using it effectively is important. It will be a good marker of success if services like these start to really take off as they are certainly abundant.

Another religious service that I recently encountered was FaithFoneWireless. Yes, this is another MVNO with a focus on the Catholic faith as their affinity group but with some added features. They have also decided to incorporate some Mobile Banking features such as donations to a charity, paying back friends and more.

Mobile Banking with a FaithFone prepaid debit-card, and card-less subordinate bank account that is accessed using your cell phone and secure internet web-site. Transfer money to accounts, pay tithes, offering, pay bills, pay a friend, and reload cell phone minutes using your Cell Phone.

A donation of 1% of your monthly bill to your local church, ministry or other non-profit organizations.

A donation of 1% of your monthly debit-card purchase to your local church, ministry or favorite non-profit organizations when you use the card to purchase air-time minutes.

Source: ~~FaithFone~~

Interesting to note that these three payments: pay tithes, offering, pay bills can be made. The idea of paying tithes seems a bit outrageous. Paying a percentage of your annual income to the church has been a long standing tradition, however, paying via your mobile phone might be a bit awkward versus writing a check. But if you’re in the business of revenue sharing, taking a few cents of every dollar transacted is a great way to increase your topline revenue, not to mention improve your bottom line.

Any and all ways to make it easier to subscribers to make payments using the Operator’s payment mechanism is great for them, but potentially bad for you. There are countless stories about how the Operator’s billing system is not 100% accurate and in fact has a high rate of errors and inconsistencies. So at this point, I’m sure if I would trust it to accurately pay my bills. I also find it hard to believe that the feature of mobile banking would cause me to switch providers. While I am an advocate for new services via your mobile device, perhaps some of them are still maturing and need temperance before they are ready for primetime. After working on a few projects over the past few years with large banks in the United States, their need to facilitate mobile banking is a mere curiosity than reality at this point.