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Experts in the field of mobile fundraising address text-to-give.

FundRaising Success: How would you define where the fundraising sector in the United States is in regard to mobile giving?

Jim Killion: Mobile giving is in its infancy, but with the dramatic results achieved by the Red Cross with text-to-give to Haiti relief, it is now on most people's radar. In many ways, mobile giving is where what is now often referred to as "traditional Internet giving" was six or eight years ago. And just as Internet giving has taken off in the last decade, so will mobile giving. But the move to mobile will be much faster than the move to Internet giving.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, noted recently, "Mobile Web adoption is growing eight times faster than the first wave of PC Internet adoption. There may be some limits, but we're not anywhere near them."

Reuters noted in a March 11 article that "sales of smartphones like the iPhone are forecast to grow by about 50 percent this year to 250 million units, compared with 20 percent growth to 366 million units for PCs."

Tony Aiello: Mobile donations are still at an early stage in the U.S. Before the Haiti earthquake, most Americans did not know that it was possible to donate by text message. The terrible tragedy in Haiti brought awareness of mobile donations to millions of people, but it's still an emerging methodology for giving.

There are some fundamental characteristics about the text donation channel that make it a great way to solicit and receive donations. For one thing, people have their mobile phones with them almost all of the time. That makes it easy for them to take action whenever and wherever they are motivated to give. It's also so easy for people to make a mobile donation. They can just push a few buttons, and it's done. They don't need to go to their PC. They don't need to enter a credit card. They don't even need a bank account.

We've just begun to develop the channel and its potential. There are emerging mobile technologies that are being introduced nearly every day, and we are deploying charitable-giving links for many of these new technologies — things like better links to social media through mobile devices, location-enabled applications, mapping, imaging, donor data collection and seamless integration with CRM systems.

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