Kirsty Stephenson explains how Child’s i Foundation went mobile on a tiny budget.

Child’s i Foundation is a small and relatively young organisation, and as such, has had the opportunity to embrace new technologies without resistance or obstacles created by old systems or processes. 
The free social channels have been an obvious choice for connecting and bringing together our community of supporters - particularly when budgets are slim and resources are minimal (we have three members of staff in the UK, with only one full-time). But it also seemed logical to us to embrace mobile technology, too; after all, 95 per cent of the UK population uses a mobile phone. We know our existing and potential supporters are increasingly reliant on their phones and devices in all aspects of their lives, and while we don’t want to invade someone’s personal, family or professional lives with an over-abundance of charity messaging, we do want to harness the power of mobile for communication, as well as fundraising.

Beyond Wordpress

As part of our efforts to be as mobile friendly as possible, we scrapped our Wordpress-built website a year or so ago, and instead turned to Tumblr. It had dawned on us that most of the information we had on our website before was completely superfluous (much of it was out of date, too, and a burden to us to update). We discovered that our network of social channels can do most the work for us that our website was doing (e.g YouTube is our video archive, Facebook and Twitter our communities, Pinterest and Flickr our photo albums, etc).  

Tumblr, meanwhile, acts as our hub for all of this content; it’s the place where we curate all the most relevant information that will immediately tell our story to new visitors, while quickly updating returning visitors on the latest news and activity. We like Tumblr in particular because it’s social, easily navigable, simple to update and very personal. The content we deliver looks good on a phone or tablet, sharing capabilities are built in, and it’s free to use. 

Mobilising the masses

We have also been using Open Fundraising’s regular mobile giving platform, Mobilise, since 2012. We have been fortunate in that use of the platform has kindly been donated to us by Open Fundraising, which means we don’t need to pay the platform fees, only the cost of the messages sent. Mobilise gives us the opportunity to provide up-to-date content to our supporters each month, with very little admin involved. We like the fact supporters are asked every month if they would like to continue giving or whether they would like to stop or just skip that month, because it forces an organisation such as ourselves to deliver on our promises – we need to keep providing the information that keeps our supporters believing in the work we do.  

We know our mobile supporters really want to give. While they may be anonymous (other than a mobile number), they show a high level of commitment, with only a few lapsed donors and relatively few skips over the last two years. We suspect the low level of financial commitment – just £3 per month, compared to the average direct debit donation - helps in creating less donor attrition.

Compatible partners

We believe social and mobile are very compatible fundraising partners; indeed we use Mobilise as a fundraising product to harvest interest from our social channels - for example, we set up relevant text short-codes to support specific social content, most recently for our sixth birthday celebrations where we encouraged our supporters to sign up to regular giving using the code '6YEARS' and to share the code on their social networks. 

Our social supporters are already a reasonably committed bunch, and by signing up to mobile, they receive content each month that others don’t. This means each and every mobile supporter plays an ever deeper and more critical role in our project - a movement that will deliver real and lasting change to the lives of the people we help.

Kirsty Stephenson is digital strategy and marketing manager at Child’s i Foundation. You can follow Kirsty on Twitter @kirsty