These days The Agitator is badgering readers on the importance of mastering mobile almost as much as we hammer away at donor retention.

Why? For the simple fact that mobile is becoming the dominant vehicle for digital interaction — from simple communication to entertainment to e-commerce … pulling mobile fundraising along in the wake.

Here’s yet another instructive guide from the commercial space regarding mobile marketing, this time from Oracle — The Modern Marketer’s Guide To Mobile. A few comments on that, and then some mobile data specifically about fundraising.

Of course the Oracle guide opens with some tantalizing stats on mobile use (are these getting familiar?):

• On average, consumers check their mobile devices 150 times a day;
• More than 20% of mobile traffic goes to e-commerce sites;
• 79% of smartphone owners use their devices to buy products or services;
• Consumers spent $182 billion on mobile commerce in 2013, and that’s expected to surpass $700 billion by 2018 … almost a four-fold increase.

Oracle’s guide makes two key points relevant to fundraisers: 1) incorporating mobile into your communications scheme requires breaking down any silos that prevent true integration of your various outreach channels; 2) your planning must adapt to the reality that your customers (donors) now control the timing of interactions … your communications ‘calendar’ is virtually irrelevant.

But coming more directly to mobile fundraising, check out this information from Blackbaud, as published on their npEngage blog (based on a study of 343 small and midsize nonprofits):

• An average of 9.5% of donations came via mobile devices. For the top one-fourth of nonprofits with the highest mobile-to-desktop giving ratio, that average climbed to almost 18%.
• 12% of membership purchases came from smartphones or tablets, with 17% coming from mobile-responsive websites.
• Almost 20% of event registrations came from mobile devices.
• 49% of emails sent by the nonprofits in the study were read on mobile devices.
• 17% of donors who gave via an email were using mobile devices (a bit more for nonprofit sites with responsive design).

Convinced yet that you need to master mobile?

Tom

P.S. Here’s the Blackbaud data in infographic form: