Mobile donating

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Mobile donating refers to donating (to an organization) using a mobile device. Mobile donating is primarily done through an SMS or a phone call.

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Mobile donating process

Premium SMS donations: Text messaging, or SMS, is the primary means of mobile donating. Mobile phone users can make donations by texting a keyword to a specific SMS short code. Keywords are determined by the fundraising organization, and usually pertain to the organization's cause or purpose. Donation amounts are predetermined, commonly at $5 or $10, and users often have a limit of how many micro-donations they can send via sms to a single campaign in one month. [1] After donating, users receive a confirmation text message and the donation amount is added to their monthly phone bill. Donations can take up to 90 days to be processed. [2]

WAP donations: Mobile donating can also occur through a mobile WAP website. Cell phone users can access WAP donation pages by sending a specific text message to a designated keyword and receiving a link to the page in response, or by navigating to the page from a referring site. Upon reaching the WAP donation page, users are prompted to enter their cell phone numbers. Donations are confirmed with a text message sent to the donor's mobile phone, and the donation is added to the donor's monthly phone bill.

Mobile fundraising campaigns

In the 2008 Text 2HELP campaign, the American Red Cross, in collaboration with the Wireless Foundation, has raised over US$190,000 through 38,091 text messages to provide relief for victims of natural disasters like Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike. [3] In South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s charity raised $85,000 USD in July 2008 with the cooperation of Zain, a South African mobile operator, using Mandela’s 90th birthday as the ‘call to give’; well-wishers from around the world could text in a birthday wish and make a donation at the same time. [4]

The hitherto most successful mobile donating campaign has been organized in support of the relief efforts for the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The American Red Cross has raised over $32 million within one month after the disaster, and has demonstrated the unprecedented potential for small text-message donations. [5]

Drawbacks to mobile giving

Mobile giving can be a convenient way to donate to charity, but charity watchdog group the American Institute of Philanthropy has warned that there are some pitfalls to cell phone giving, including concerns that service providers may charge fees or take a cut of the donations. AIP also warns that it can take as long as 120 days for a charity to actually receive a text donation and that wireless carriers may limit the number of times per month a user can donate via text. [6] The watchdog group cautions, “A charity will generally receive your donation faster if you mail a check or donate directly to the charity online using its secure web site." [6]

Scammers may also take advantage of natural disasters by posing as legitimate charities. [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SMS</span> Text messaging service component

Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text messages. An intermediary service can facilitate a text-to-voice conversion to be sent to landlines.

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from a mobile phone over a cellular network. Users and providers may refer to such a message as a PXT, a picture message, or a multimedia message. The MMS standard extends the core SMS capability, allowing the exchange of text messages greater than 160 characters in length. Unlike text-only SMS, MMS can deliver a variety of media, including up to forty seconds of video, one image, a slideshow of multiple images, or audio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Text messaging</span> Act of typing and sending a brief, digital message

Text messaging, or texting, is the act of composing and sending electronic messages, typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters, between two or more users of mobile devices, desktops/laptops, or another type of compatible computer. Text messages may be sent over a cellular network or may also be sent via satellite or Internet connection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile phone spam</span> Unwanted communication through a mobile phone

Mobile phone spam is a form of spam, directed at the text messaging or other communications services of mobile phones or smartphones. As the popularity of mobile phones surged in the early 2000s, frequent users of text messaging began to see an increase in the number of unsolicited commercial advertisements being sent to their telephones through text messaging. This can be particularly annoying for the recipient because, unlike in email, some recipients may be charged a fee for every message received, including spam. Mobile phone spam is generally less pervasive than email spam, where in 2010 around 90% of email is spam. The amount of mobile spam varies widely from region to region. In North America, mobile spam steadily increased after 2008 and accounted for half of all mobile phone traffic by 2019. In parts of Asia up to 30% of messages were spam in 2012.

Vodafone Limited, trading as Vodafone UK, is a British telecommunications services provider, and a part of Vodafone Group Plc, the world's second-largest mobile phone company. Vodafone is the third-largest mobile network operator in the United Kingdom, with 18.5 million subscribers as of February 2024, after O2 and EE, followed by Three. The country's first cellular phone call was made on the Vodafone network in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile phone feature</span> Mobile phone capability or application

A mobile phone feature is a capability, service, or application that a mobile phone offers to its users. Mobile phones are often referred to as feature phones, and offer basic telephony. Handsets with more advanced computing ability through the use of native code try to differentiate their own products by implementing additional functions to make them more attractive to consumers. This has led to great innovation in mobile phone development over the past 20 years.

Mobile content is any type of web hypertext and information content and electronic media which is viewed or used on mobile phones, like text, sound, ringtones, graphics, flash, discount offers, mobile games, movies, and GPS navigation. As mobile phone use has grown since the mid-1990s, the usage and significance of the mobile devices in everyday technological life has grown accordingly. Owners of mobile phones can now use their devices to make photo snapshots for upload, twits, mobile calendar appointments, and mostly send and receive text messages, listen to music, watch videos, take mobile pictures and make videos, use websites to redeem coupons for purchases, view and edit office documents, get driving instructions on mobile maps and so on. The use of mobile content in various areas has grown accordingly.

Short codes, or short numbers, are short digit-sequences - significantly shorter than telephone numbers - that are used to address messages in the Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) and short message service (SMS) systems of mobile network operators. In addition to messaging, they may be used in abbreviated dialing.

Charity fraud is the act of using deception to obtain money from people who believe they are donating to a charity. Often, individuals or groups will present false information claiming to be a charity or associated with one, and then ask potential donors for contributions to this non-existent charity. Charity fraud encompasses not only fictitious charities but also deceptive business practices. These deceitful acts by businesses may involve accepting donations without using the funds for their intended purposes or soliciting funds under false pretenses of need.

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel online marketing technique focused at reaching a specific audience on their smartphones, feature phones, tablets, or any other related devices through websites, e-mail, SMS and MMS, social media, or mobile applications. Mobile marketing can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes goods, services, appointment reminders and ideas. In a more theoretical manner, academic Andreas Kaplan defines mobile marketing as "any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device".

A mobile campaign is a campaign, usually marketing, advertising, or public relations-related, through which organizations contact their audience through SMS. This form of campaigning allows organizations to reach out and establish relationships with an audience in a more individualized, intimate way. The foundational function of mobile campaigns is regularly referred to as mobile marketing. A campaign's goal can have varied consumer consumption objectives including flashing, informing or engaging. Mobile campaigns have developed from the periphery of advertising to being an integral part of an effective marketing strategy. Online advertising is the second largest advertising spend at $113 billion, next to television's $196.5 billion. Near the introduction of mobile campaigns, they were primarily created to boost the impact of primary campaigns. A good example of one of the first mobile campaigns is the viewer voting system employed in American Idol. Using the American Idol example, the primary campaign was television, and the engagement was mobile, “watch this show, and text to vote”. In 2012, there were over 131 million votes in a single night, setting the world mobile voting record. With over 90% of Americans having cell phones, and there being over 6.8 billion cell phones in circulation globally versus 2.4 billion with internet access, mobile campaigns are evolving to be the way of the future in advertising and consumer engagement.

Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing, mobile advertising can take place as text ads via SMS, or banner advertisements that appear embedded in a mobile web site.

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that use the protocol. Introduced in 1999, WAP achieved some popularity in the early 2000s, but by the 2010s it had been largely superseded by more modern standards. Almost all modern handset internet browsers now fully support HTML, so they do not need to use WAP markup for web page compatibility, and therefore, most are no longer able to render and display pages written in WML, WAP's markup language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile phone</span> Portable device to make telephone calls using a radio link

A mobile phone is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area, as opposed to a fixed-location phone. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture and therefore mobile telephones are called cellphones in North America. In addition to telephony, digital mobile phones support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, multimedia messaging, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications, satellite access, business applications, payments, multimedia playback and streaming, digital photography, and video games. Mobile phones offering only basic capabilities are known as feature phones ; mobile phones which offer greatly advanced computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Humanitarian response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake</span>

The response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake included national governments, charitable and for-profit organizations from around the world which began coordinating humanitarian aid designed to help the Haitian people. Some countries arranged to send relief and rescue workers and humanitarian supplies directly to the earthquake damage zones, while others sought to organize national fund raising to provide monetary support for the nonprofit groups working directly in Haiti. OCHA coordinates and tracks this on a daily basis. The information is disseminated through the UN news and information portal, ReliefWeb. As of September 5, 2013, ReliefWeb have reported a total relief funding of $3.5 billion given.

FrontlineSMS is a free open source software used by a variety of organizations to distribute and collect information via text messaging (SMS). The software works without an internet connection and with a cell phone and computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Humanitarian response by non-governmental organizations to the 2010 Haiti earthquake</span>

The humanitarian responses by non-governmental organizations to the 2010 Haiti earthquake included many organisations, such as international, religious, and regionally based NGOs, which immediately pledged support in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Besides a large multi-contingency contribution by national governments, NGOs contributed significantly to both on-the-ground rescue efforts and external solicitation of aid for the rescue efforts.

This article describes humanitarian responses from "for-profit" organizations, such as business corporations, following the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti.

Etiquette in technology, colloquially referred to as netiquette, is a term used to refer to the unofficial code of policies that encourage good behavior on the Internet which is used to regulate respect and polite behavior on social media platforms, online chatting sites, web forums, and other online engagement websites. The rules of etiquette that apply when communicating over the Internet are different from these applied when communicating in person or by audio or photographic phone. It is a social code that is used in all places where one can interact with other human beings via the Internet, including text messaging, email, online games, Internet forums, chat rooms, and many more. Although social etiquette in real life is ingrained into our social life, netiquette is a fairly recent concept.

Text-to-Pledge (TTP) is a mobile devices program for pledging charitable contributions. The technology is generally employed by non-profit organizations to increase donations at live fundraising events in the United States.

References

  1. Jesse Feiler, ed.Katrin Verclas (February 4, 2010). "Texting for Charitable Dollars: The Definitive Guide to Mobile Fundraising". MobileActive.org. Archived from the original on April 20, 2010. Retrieved April 24, 2010.
  2. Liz Gannes (January 14, 2010). "Haiti Text Donation Campaigns Face 90-Day Delays". Gigaom. Retrieved April 24, 2010.
  3. Khan, Mickey Alam (2008-12-04). "Red Cross attracts $190K in pledges via Text 2HELP program". Mobile Marketer . Retrieved 2010-01-28.
  4. Katrin Verclas (February 23, 2009). "How does mobile giving work?". MobileActive.org. Retrieved April 24, 2010.
  5. "Red Cross Raises More than $32 Million via Mobile Giving Program". American Red Cross. February 11, 2010. Retrieved April 24, 2010.
  6. 1 2 "Charity Ratings | America's Most Independent, Assertive Charity Watchdog | CharityWatch". www.charitywatch.org. Retrieved 2019-06-07.
  7. Kaplan, Jeremy A. (January 16, 2010). "As World Looks to Help Haiti, Scammers Sit Poised". Fox News .