Lowering the barriers to philanthropy
As cellphones become ever more entrenched as our indispensable interface to the networked world, this kind of smart-mob-philanthropy will only increase. It’s hard to imagine anything that takes less physical or mental effort than texting a five letter word to a five digit address. (HAITI to 90999). (Why, it just took me seven seconds to do it in between writing the last sentence and this one.) You’d have to be pretty lazy, or pretty flint-hearted, or pretty destitute not to do it. You don’t need Internet access, you don’t need a computer, you don’t need to tell your credit card number to anyone… you just need a cellphone.
Andrew Leonard on how “text to donate” lowers the friction of making a donation. I would love to see a graph that showed how much less likely people are to donate the longer they consider a request for a donation. Making it easy for people to give is the key to successful fund raising.
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