Mobile Programs: What’s good? What’s bad? What’s the norm?

In the wake of the Haiti earthquake, we all saw the Red Cross show how mobile giving could change the face of fundraising, raising $32 million from $5 and $10 gifts through text messages.

Now, just a month after releasing benchmarks for social media, M+R Strategic Services teamed up with Mobile Active to release its first-ever mobile benchmarks study, taking a look at how nonprofits are using text messaging programs and establishing some metrics by which an organization can evaluate its own.

Some of the most interesting findings:
- Nearly 80% of subscribers to text programs signed up online.
- Mobile programs are a growth industry – the annual increase in list size this year was a whopping 49.5%! (But it’s important to note that list “churn” – the rate at which subscribers leave the list, mostly through their numbers becoming undeliverable – is also very high, 30.7%)
- One of the ways text programs have had the largest impact is on call-in efforts. Recipients of text messages participated in a call-in at a rate five times as high (4.7% ) as those who received the action via email (0.82%). That’s one of the benefits of having your advocates already on their phone – making a phone call is literally just a few clicks away.

This is just the first effort to try to quantify the norms in mobile programs, but it’s already clear that they have a lot to offer the world of nonprofit advocacy.