Where next for mobile giving?

Following from last week's post on mobile giving in the UK, I thought it might be useful to share this rather good presentation from US digital agency, space150 on broader trends in mobile use.

• Convenience
• Context
• Fun

Convenience is the obvious one for fundraisers. Providing supporters with an easy way to donate and receive updates on work they are funding seems like a sensible option.

But when you consider that mobile companies are looking at how they can replace our wallets and keys with NFC technology (Near Field Communications) you begin to appreciate that offering a mobile giving option could soon become something of a necessity.

The impact of context on mobile giving needs a little more consideration. It has more obvious use in the commercial world, where we are seeing rapid growth in the use of customised search and location services (such as foursquare).

But it's not necessarily so clear what this offers charities.

Orange has recently released their Do Some Good micro-volunteering app which provides opportunities to do nice things for charities whenever someone has five minutes spare time.

Hopefully the attraction of free concert tickets might encourage a greater level of participation than was seen with the original micro-volunteering app, The Extraordinaries. The team behind this idea soon re-focussed their efforts on the desk-top environment through Sparked, simply because it offered a more effective volunteering platform.

Or perhaps we need to look some of the award winning ideas coming out of places like Kingston University for inspiration…

Re:write – a mobile app that adds extra functionality to newspaper apps, giving people the opportunity to act on current events as they read about them.

Donate at the Gate – which offers NFC users (that's Oyster cards to you and me) the chance to donate to charity by going through a specific gate at a train station.

These concepts show that there are most certainly different and effective ways to fundraise that place context at the centre of the donor experience. We just need to come up with ideas that donors will find attractive.

I'd be particularly tempted by a special charity gate at Old Street tube when there are huge queues of people waiting to get in or out of the station.

Which leaves us with fun.

That doesn't take much explanation but when it comes to older donors, there's one piece of old-fashioned technology that can get in the way of making the mobile phone a fun way to interact with a charity. And unfortunately it's one I have to struggle with…