Soapbox Engage Blog

We dig the good folks at Pew Internet. They do some great research to uncover important trends in this, our wired world. Take some numbers from a post summarizing a recent report of theirs:

“Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points over the 35% of Americans who owned a smartphone last May. Two in five adults (41%) own a cell phone that is not a smartphone, meaning that smartphone owners are now more prevalent within the overall population than owners of more basic mobile phones.”

Not shocking news, eh? Yeah, we didn’t think so. This tidbit from another study by Pew Internet won’t be either but the percentages may surprise you

:

“The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.”

It seems Santa got busy getting mobile over the holidays - and no one is betting against that trend continuing.

To keep up with our wired world going wireless, you need an online donations approach that’s as mobile as your visitors are. Like pick-up-and-go-at-a-moment’s-notice mobile. Mongolian nomad type mobile. So mobile to the core it could get elected President of Mobiledonationistan and appoint its own Finance Minister, Ms. Get Alotofmoney-Online.

How do you know if your donations strategy is mobile-friendly and likes to move it, move it? Scan these five essentials for a little mobile health self-assessment:

#1: SSL donation forms: Know them, use them, love them

We admit it. This isn’t exclusive to donations made on mobile devices. It is so do-not-pass-Go do-not-collect-$200 essential for a donations form, though, that our jaw drops whenever we go to a non-profit’s donation form and don’t see “https://” and that comforting locked lock in the domain bar of our browser. Not having this inspires all the confidence of a shady dude in a trench coat approaching you on the street to sell you a Rolex watch.

If your non-profit is the dude in the trench coat because your donation form isn’t using secure sockets layers (SSL), call someone to get that changed. Like now. Don’t worry. The rest of us will wait while you do before we move on.

#2: Responsive template design: a few sizes fit all

What is it? It’s all the rage, my friend. It’s a snazzy way that a website can morph to fit a variety of different size devices without specific coding for individual device types. That means one donation form can be as viewable on a desktop as on a laptop as on a tablet as on a smart phone.

For an example, check out this short video:

#3: Easily customizable donation appeals: make your pitch the way you want regardless of the device it is viewed on

This little bit goes hand in hand with the previous item. Your donation form should provide you an easy way to customize your appeal - in words and pictures and embedded video - in a way that you can be as persuasive as possible when soliciting donations. And the technology behind that donation form should be ready-made to morph that appeal as part of a responsive design template to display properly on any device.

Here’s a little test to get at what we mean: do you have the ability to edit your current donation page right now by embedding a video of, say, a client success story above the payment form so folks checking out your website on their mobile phone with their ear buds in while jogging on the treadmill at the gym could watch it and be convinced to give you cash before their run was done?

#4: HTML5 field types: handy form fields for one-handed form donations on mobile devices

Many a tech-inclined individual gushes about the beauty and power of HTML5. For our purposes here, we’ve just interested in one little part of it; namely, the way field input types can be defined and used by smarty-pants devices to adjust based on the type of input the user is supposed to enter. It's a little gem we're tossing into our own tools as we write this.

What do we mean? If a field type is, say, an email field, a mobile device can be smart enough to adjust the keyboard to show the @ sign by default when the user clicks on the field. Or, more to the point, if it’s a number field on your donation form for a custom donation amount, it can flip to the numeric version of the keyboard. Handy, eh? And handy is good when we want folks to give money when using just one hand on their mobile device.

#5: Real-time integration with your constituent relationship management system: reduce the money it takes to track the money you get

As with #1, this isn’t exclusive to mobile donations but we’re a hopeful bunch at PICnet and choose to believe that once you’ve passed your mobile donation check up, you’ll need this due to the flood of donations you’ll be getting. Does your current donation tool update your constituent relationship management (CRM) system in real-time when a donation is received - or does it take an actual human being using actual staff time which costs actual cash money to record that transaction in your CRM? If not, your data needs to be as mobile as your donation strategy is going to be.

As an example, here’s another quick video: