Save the Children USA has just about everything you’d expect of a charity hailed for its digital fundraising: an attractive website that’s easy to navigate and translates well to mobile devices. Some 1.6 million Facebook “likes.” Nearly 1.4 million Twitter followers. In 2015, 2.4 percent of the charity’s estimated $435 million in private support came from online fundraising.
What Save the Children USA doesn’t have is an app to call its own. And that’s no oversight. Creating a mobile application for smartphones and tablets may be “trendy,” says Ettore Rossetti, the organization’s senior director of social business strategy and innovation, but it also might not be worth the effort,
“There’s a tendency with venerable organizations to fall to ‘shiny object syndrome,’ " he says.
An app designed solely to accelerate fundraising “may serve the organization, but it doesn’t serve the donor,” he says: Supporters will ask, “Why should I download this app? I have limited time, limited attention, limited space on my phone, limited screen visibility.”
Mobile applications need constant updating and a big, loyal audience.
That’s not to say Save the Children ignores the growing number of people who conduct much of their personal and professional business on smartphones. The charity solicits text-to-give donations and has entered into a few small partnerships with companies that pass along to nonprofits donations they collect via their apps, Mr. Rossetti says. But it hasn’t yet found a reason to create an app for itself. Rather, it’s pursuing other avenues to broaden its reach and raise money, like teaming up with YouTube and video-game stars.
2 Million Downloads
A few charities have found ways to use apps to further their mission. Conservation group the National Audubon Society, for example, created a bird-watching app to help supporters identify feathered creatures; it has been downloaded 2 million times. (See Page 22.)
Some organizations are using apps to help raise money, process donations, and push out communications, experts say. The Muscular Dystrophy Association works with a marketing company on a mobile and a Facebook app for three fundraising events; those apps bring in roughly 10 percent of the group’s income for those events, according to Natalie Stamer, the charity’s vice president of digital and content marketing.
Still, many nonprofits haven’t taken the plunge. Ms. Stamer, who previously worked at the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, says building an app “was always on the priority list, year after year, and it never floated to the top.” St. Baldrick’s already had a top-notch mobile site, she says, so spending resources on an app “never seemed right.”
DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that helps schoolteachers raise money for classroom projects, focuses on making its mobile site user-friendly. It has toyed, however, with creating an app to make it easier for teachers to post projects and thank donors, says Katie Bisbee, the group’s chief marketing officer. “We’d be more likely to create an app to serve our beneficiaries than to collect donations,” she says.
Many fundraising experts remain cautious about apps as a vehicle for drawing donations. “The hard part for a lot of organizations is that their support base isn’t big enough that [it] warrants development of an app,” notes Rob Wu, CEO of CauseVox, a crowdfunding site.
Charlie Melichar, senior consultant and principal at Marts and Lundy, which advises charities on fundraising, points up another problem with apps: They needs constant attention. “You’ve got to really own it and feed it,” he says. “A lot of places don’t have the time to create it and market it and spend time feeding it with great, unique, and interesting content.”
Plus, “it’s a heck of a lot easier [for supporters] to get to a mobile site” than go to the trouble of finding and downloading an app, Mr. Melichar says. Making the mobile experience better for supporters, he adds, may be the most productive use of an organization’s resources.
If that’s true, many organizations have some catching up to do. A 2014 study by Dunham+Company, a fundraising consultancy, found that 84 percent of charities had not made their websites easy to read on mobile.
“I think social media threw everyone a curveball, and people invested their digital assets into social media, and not their website,” says Alia McKee, principal of Sea Change Strategies, which also advises on fundraising. “And it’s definitely at their expense.”
