The Haiti crisis showed us that text donations can be a powerful tool in an emergency, allowing people to react instantly and offer their support.  When an earthquake recently hit Chile, donors once again showed their willingness to support through text-based giving . Seems like this is a valuable tool for non-profits, right? It is, although day-to-day campaigns don't experience anywhere close to the generosity that these tragedies returned. There are a number of challenges to overcome.

The technology to setup a text (or SMS) campaign is limited for daily use. First, it costs donors money, and that's bad. Second, the donation-to-cause ratio is very low, making financial justification difficult for the non-profit. Typically, non-profit's end up paying a transaction fee of 5-10% back to the vendor, plus up to 50% of the donation amount to the wireless carrier. For Haiti and Chile, this last fee was waved but only after public complaints. Don't expect this trend to extend to daily SMS campaign use. Text donations also are capped and usually limited to $10.

With SMS, dynamic content is pretty difficult, too (*wink*). Anyone who's run a campaign knows that a tragedy needs very little motivational support to draw interest from donors. The difficulty of regular campaigns, growing supporters, capital campaigning, etc. is effective and engaging messaging. Texting is a limiting agent-not just because of the display, but donors' contact information can't be collected, hindering non-profits from building new relationships.

If only there was a way to capitalize on 22.4 million U.S. consumers accessing the Internet from their smartphones (comScore, March 2009), with dynamic content that increases the donation-to-cause ratio and for daily use... the Artez Mobile Communicator is the solution, designed to solve all of the text-based email drawbacks on smartphones!

Interested in more info on the Artez Mobile Communicator? Click here for details. You can also follow us on Twitter @artezonline or friend us on Facebook.