Leaving Donations On The Screen
One topic you can expect to see The Agitator dwell upon over the coming year is mobile.
Firstly, all the media/digital monitoring services are now reporting that more than half of emails are opened with a mobile device. And mobile viewing of online video, as well as your ‘plain ole’ website, is also accelerating very rapidly. See The Agitator’s reporting here, here and here.
Second, undoubtedly, virtually all nonprofits, looking at trends to date, have built aggressive growth assumptions for online revenue into their 2014 projections. High expectations have been created for the bosses and boards.
But, if you are not optimizing your digital presentations for mobile viewing, you’ll be leaving donations on the screen. I expect that the term ‘responsive design’ will become as oft-used (and oft-ignored) as ‘integrated marketing’.
Over the holiday, I noticed this claim by fundraising software firm DonorDrive:
“After DonorDrive implemented responsive design as part of the software for every client, mobile donation dollars almost doubled.”
I’ll accept the claim in good faith. And I’m sure other smart nonprofits and digital consultants can report similar results. We’d like to hear from you.
Says Amy Fecker of DonorDrive:
“If a donor gets an email on their phone asking their support and the font is so small they can’t read it, or the donate button is too small to press, the organization is likely to lose that donor. With half of all email opened on mobile devices now, their fundraising software must make email communications and donation pages mobile friendly or the nonprofit can really be losing out.”
Is your nonprofit mobile ready?
Tom
One response to “Leaving Donations On The Screen”
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And mucking the waters for nonprofits who get how important mobile is and are trying to be front of the pack in leveraging the power of this emerging channel is new confusion.
What exactly *is* mobile?
That seemed pretty clear until several months ago when Google decided to lump tablets into the desktop category for the purpose of its ad platform — and much (but far from all) of the world decided to follow suit in how tablets are categorized.
Savvy nonprofit marketers trying to master “mobile” and determine what works and what doesn’t now also need to sort through discrepancies in studies and data and figure out whether references are to smartphones *only* or smartphones *and* tablets. And it’s more than just semantics. They are indeed very different platforms that elicit different types of behavior and present unique challenges.
Here’s a nice summary of some of the issues:
http://bit.ly/1cPPY7n
Good luck to all of us!