Without wanting to sound like a complete cynic, my first
reaction when I was told about Vodafone and JustGiving’s new free text donation
service for charities was to wonder what the catch was.
The service is being offered to every single registered
charity in the UK – according to the Charity Commission’s website this morning,
this is 162,028 organisations and counting. And from June the service will be
offered to all individual fundraisers as well – suddenly millions will have
access to it.
And the main reason that until now hundreds of thousands of
small charities have had to avoid using SMS for fundraising is because of the
high costs involved in doing so.
I have been quite reliably informed that Guy Laurence, chief
executive of Vodafone, has had a lot of personal involvement in pushing this
through because he genuinely wants to use the expertise that Vodafone has in
this area of technology to help raise more money for good causes.
That may be all well and good, but so far Vodafone has
invested £5m into this, and I can only begin to imagine just how much this
project will have cost the company if it is still going a few years down the
line.
I find it highly doubtful that, even if this was approached
in the best interests of charities by Laurence, all of the company’s
shareholders will see things in quite such an altruistic light.
They must be convinced, or the powers that be at Vodafone
must know that they can be convinced, that there will be a good return on investment
here.
To me this signals just how valuable this kind of publicity
and branding is to these companies. They are happy to spend millions on it.
This is a huge opportunity for charities
and I think it shows that it’s time for the sector to get very creative and
ambitious when coming up with ideas for how companies can help them.
I’m sure that if a couple of years ago someone had come up with the
bright idea that one of the major mobile networks should fund the development
and running of a totally free text donation service for every charity and
fundraiser in the whole of the UK, they would have been laughed out the door.
But clearly it is possible for such a seemingly impossible
idea to become a reality.