Create an All Mobile Fund Raising Campaign with Streaming Video

Create an All Mobile Fund Raising Campaign with Streaming Video

Category

Streaming Media

�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:

http://greatdance.com/danceblog/archives/mobile/create-