Have you texted a donation yet? Text donations are really easy, and they’re great for charities to have in their arsenal for collecting money. 85% of people that were interested in giving to certain causes have said that they’d be interested in donating money with their mobile device. Texting yields 8 times higher engagement rates than email and a 19% click-through rate, the highest of any medium. Also, text to donate pairs really well when used in conjunction with nonprofit crowdfunding campaigns.
How Does Texting a Donation Work?
Choose a keyword that will trigger your donation sequence. For example, ITL2017, GUARDIAN, AUTISM. Your keyword can be any combination of letters and numbers. Must be 5 or more characters. No spaces or special characters.
Once you have your keyword in mind, head over to the order form.
Choose your package, supply your PayPal email.
Give us the link to your donation page, if applicable.
Give us your text message reply.
Tell us whether you want to use us, PayPal or your own payment gateway as your payment processor.
Once you pay, we set up your keyword on our short code, which is 77948, usually within the hour.
Done!
Now, when a prospective donor texts your keyword to 77948, she receives a prompt to donate to your charity. The prompt includes a link to your mobile-friendly PayPal or other checkout page to complete her donation.
Donating By Text Is Simple
Anybody with a smartphone probably already knows how to text, but how do you know what to write in the message and how to write it? Where does the money come from? How does the text find its way to the charity? The process can seem a bit confusing, but sending a text message donation is only slightly more complicated than sending a regular text message. There are just a few slight differences.
Despite the differences between a donation text and a regular text, donating is still very simple to do. In order to find that information about where to send the text and what to put in the body, you need to first know who you want to donate money to. If they have text donations available, it will say somewhere in their marketing materials what number to text (it’s usually a combination of letters and numbers of about 6 characters), and what to write in the text body. For example, for Vodafone’s Fittest Fundraiser charity, they instructed people to send a message saying “DGTR79” along with the chosen amount you’d like (ex: $5) to send them to the number 70070.
From there, the text is received by the organization. Since your message to them is really just a pledge to donate, you’ll get a reply with a link where you can actually send money through PayPal or some other payment processor. The whole process moves incredibly quick and requires little to no effort from the sender. Plus, this method avoids the drawbacks of the traditional “text-to-give” service which is very restrictive on customization and which non-profits can participate. And what comes from just a few button pushes on your phone? A whole lot of good can be brought to the world through your text donations.