The mobile phone has become the ultimate response device.

Donors can respond instantly to stimulus from any other medium – a TV commercial to a billboard to your fundraising letter or email appeal.

Considering the ascendancy of mobile devices, David Berkowitz writing in Social Media Insider proposes “Death to Internet Week” (which I gather is this week). Maybe that’s a bit premature.

Much of his article won’t interest fundraisers, but he is making a fundamental point about the movement of digital traffic – especially in the social media space – to mobile devices.

He cites stats that a majority of Facebook users – 500 million – access the service from mobile devices … and the mobile users actually spend more time accessing (441 minutes per month vs 391 for computers). In fact, 83 million people use only Facebook’s mobile services and not its online site.* Similarly, more than half of Twitter users log on via a mobile device.

While the switch to mobile access involves all sites, for social media he argues that the change is occurring even faster for two reasons:

“Mobile devices have always been designed for communication, so the only difference now is that people are using the devices more for data than voice. Younger Americans prefer texting to talking, and that preference line is creeping into older demographics each year.

Social media is increasingly about sharing content. The easiest way to create content – especially anything involving sound, images, or video – is through a mobile device. Once that content is created, it’s now fairly effortless to share it. Sharing content is usually the purpose of creating it. The ends and the means are the same. Why create content? To share it. Why share content? Because it was created.”

But his key point relates to what I would term the ‘readiness’ of your mobile device for instant response … to anything appealing, anywhere, anytime. As he says:

“It’s traditional advertising – TV, radio, print, out of home, in-store – that’s most likely to reach people who have their mobile devices on them. It doesn’t matter what the call to action is; the mobile device gives consumers a way to express their interest by taking action.”

Fundraisers have lot to learn about optimizing their efforts for mobile response. Yet I don’t see fundraisers talking about the subject … including all those consultants occupying the online fundraising space.

Just deadly silence. Maybe they’re too busy texting.

Tom

* Meanwhile, here’s a AP-CNBC poll in which half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad!