February 19, 2008

Create an All Mobile Fund Raising Campaign with Streaming Video

In MobileActive.org, Katrin Verclas writes "Is mobile giving about to take off in the United States?" She points out that non-profits have been stymied in their efforts to raise donations from wireless devices because until recently telecommunication companies were taking 50% of all contributions. [via Beth's Blog]

But now, due to the efforts of Mobile Giving Foundation, SMS-based donations are about to become much more feasible. This Washington, DC-based foundation worked-out a deal between the United Way and the telecommunication carriers whereby the phone companies eliminated all fees and United Way pays 10% of wireless donations to the Mobile Giving Foundation.

The end result was that a short United Way ad ran during the Super Bowl and raised $10,000 from 2,000 contributors via text messages - see commercial that follows. (Here's a detailed write-up about the United Way Super Bowl ad and the process of making a donation).

If non-profits will get to keep 90% of the funds they raise via text message donations, clearly there is now an incentive to explore this fundraising avenue, especially when seeking contributions in small increments from younger audiences.

How Might Dance Companies Create Mobile Fundraising Campaigns?

There are many ways to create videos for promoting online fundraising campaigns. I wrote two weeks ago about choreographer Amanda Gravel's successful campaign to raise money to support breast cancer research.

But what if we wanted to go completely wireless and create a fundraising effort that was 100% mobile? What I describe below is not very practical at this point because most people cannot watch video on their mobile devices. But it is doable and will become increasingly feasible over the next few years.

Latest Developments in Mobile Video

Most YouTube videos are now viewable and uploadable from mobile devices. Boris Willis writes about being able to show his Dance-A-Day videos on a portable media player. Here's what one of Boris' YouTube video pages would look like on a mobile device:

We are also in the early stages of real-time video broadcasting from video-enabled mobile devices. Services such as QIK, LiveCastr and Flixwagon turn your mobile phone into a real-time Internet video broadcast device [via TechCrunch]

Here's a write-up by Neville Hobson on how he used QIK and a Nokia N95 8GB to do real-time video streaming at a conference. Here's the resulting clip so you can see the quality:

And Seero takes the idea of live mobile video broadcasts and combines it with geo-tagging so that broadcasters can geo-code their videos. This way, viewers can access video content that is relevant to their physical location [via Mashable]. Here's the Seero promotional clip.

Putting the Pieces Together

So how would you use these tools to raise money for a dance company, a performance or a cause?

For starters, you would need an existing network of contacts that you could reach immediately - this could be done via an email list, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. I like Beth Kanter's post from yesterday where she shares how she used her Twitter network to generate 100 messages in 10 minutes for this Flickr photo.

With your network in place, you could then shoot and broadcast live videos. Maybe you point your phone at yourself and talk about your campaign. Maybe you broadcast a few minutes from a rehearsal. Or you broadcast live from a performance. In each case, you would need to sign-up in advance with a service that allows you to accept text-based donations. This way viewers could watch your live videos on their devices and instantly send a text message that specifies the amount of their donation.

The upcoming Seero service I mentioned above is especially interesting because it promises to combine location-specific information with the live feeds. So say you were doing a live broadcast from a rehearsal for a site-specific performance that would be performed in two-hours. Members of your network that were nearby could see a map of the location you were broadcasting from, maybe make a donation and show-up for your performance later in the day.

A piece of cake! Right? Maybe. We are likely to see many of these and similar types of experiments to find out what actually works. In the end, I think mobile devices and video streaming will be great tools for all types of dance.

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