Who has successfully deployed text-to-donate campaigns?

Carrie Powell

Hi there!

I was reading the latest Blackbaud Institute Report (The Resilient Nonprofit) and noticed the income that increased the most in the last 12 months was from text-to-donate (46%).

We have not deployed that method, likely because our donors have tended to be from the Baby Boomer (or older!) generations (as is some of our development staff). Gifts from Gen X and Millennials have usually come through in-person interactions rather than direct mail (and we don't have a lot of Gen Z donors).

I saw a discussion that @Keith Wilson posted last August, and wondered whether other organizations have successfully moved into this realm in the past year, as the report suggests.

If so, how do you collect phone numbers and get their permission to send?

Faith Murray

@Carrie Powell, we have not tried text-to-give programs ourselves, but have been trying to keep a pulse on them. I recently forwarded this article from the NonProfit Pro to my boss. It's a recap of a Bridge conference session on texting programs.

Keith Wilson

@Carrie Powell thanks for the mention. It has been awhile since I made that post, and not much has happened since. When we terminated our contract with the service we were using, and tried to implement a new solution, we were met with the challenge of not having Opt-in permissions to import phone numbers from our donors. Without showing proof of donors opting in, we were told our text messages would be blocked. At that point, I added the Opt-in channels to our online donation forms so we could collect these opt-in permissions. However, we started to see long time, regular recurring donors--advocates for our mission--OPTING OUT! ? They didn't just opt out of SMS messaging, but opted out of all forms of communication! It has been about a year now, and I haven't tried to run any numbers on donors that have given us permission to send texts, but we also haven't followed through on trying to utilize text2give either. I would still like to hear what others are doing in regard to this topic.

Dariel Dixon

@Carrie Powell This is such a tough topic. I think it depends on context and what you're looking for with the campaign. When I was in higher ed, we were looking at texting programs, but our goal was not only to increase the bottom line, but to also increase our alumni participation rate. At the time, we couldn't get text donations tied back to alumni records, so the idea kinda died because of that. In other verticals/fields, this doesn't come into play, as they can be great for getting in lots of smaller donations.

@Keith Wilson makes a great point. Opt-outs are going to be a thing. A big thing. Make sure you take these things into account in addition to having a good idea of how your constituency will react. I wonder how these reports take the age of the population into consideration.

Lee Grisham

@Faith Murray this is the same person that led the webinar yesterday through Blackbaud about a text giving report. Of course this was mostly highlighting successes that organizations have had and did not truly address any issues that orgs are having with opting out. There were some stats on how many opt out per message type and it was close to par with email messaging. The harder part is what @Keith Wilson mentioned to get them to opt in!

Until a communication platform allows you to dig in to which type of communication donors want to receive, there will be a huge barrier to implementing this.

Faith Murray

@Lee Grisham
When I discussed it with our boss, I believe what we figured out was that, for us, texting programs seemed better affiliated with events or small membership groups. Just as email signups often have an incentive (sign up to receive our free legacy guide), texting opt-ins would also need incentivized. We have heard other nonprofits using texting in conjunction with auctions, races, or other activities where a donor may like to be kept up-to-date on a project in real time, and receiving texts became part of the participant process. We concluded that no donor is going to opt-in to text solicitations, but that texts might productively be used for real-time updates, invitations, prayer campaigns, etc. Then one could “slip in” an ask a couple of times a year.

We also want to delineate our opt-out language and separate our systems - making it clear that opting out of bulk text updates is not the same thing as opting out of personal phonecalls since we may have legitimate questions about processing their gifts or checking their mailing address down the road.

I share our conclusions here, but I'm afraid we can't share any real experiences yet, because we aren't at a place to actually implement. We switched away from auction events a few years ago and our current events just don't have the program urgency to activate texting opt-ins, so not the right foundation for launching at this time.

Rachel Cavalier

We've never really used text-to-donate much as JustGiving stopped offering it maybe nearly a decade ago and the other providers are costly, particularly for the amount it's used by our supporters.

The times that we have used it were to allow supporters to make their donations by text message at events that primarily raise awareness of our organisation, rather than ones that are specifically to raise funds. Since the increase in popularity of QR codes though, it's just as straightforward for a supporter use that to open the donation page on our website to make a donation and we receive far more useful information this way to be able to match their donation to our existing records for them.

We don't do any mass marketing communication by text message so most often we've used the option that didn't opt supporters into SMS marketing as it's far clearer and simpler on the posters. There was also the matter of the limited amount of information we'd receive - we can't exactly put only mobile number into the database with no names etc so opt-in for SMS marketing only really worked for existing supporters that we knew the mobile numbers for and those whose donations were eligible for Gift Aid (in which case we also received their name and address).

Carrie Powell

@Rachel Cavalier, thanks for the response. Our hurdles are similar to yours.

Carrie Powell

@Faith Murray, thanks for the article!