Mobile Donations... That Was Easy

When news of the tragic earthquake in Haiti spread across the globe last week, millions of people asked, “What can I do to help?” No more than a few hours after the disaster, The American Red Cross answered with, “You can send us a text”... and hundreds of thousands of people reached for their phones to donate.

The Red Cross wasted no time in working with mobile donations provider, the mGive Foundation, to launch a mobile campaign urging people to text ‘Haiti’ to 90999 to donate $10 to their relief efforts. And thanks in part to the current power of mobile messaging (traditional media attention obviously helped too), their message spread faster than you can say “smartphone” via texting, email, and social media. Allowing text message responses let people donate quickly and easily, no matter where they were when they heard the call to action.

The campaign launched at 9 PM Tuesday night and 37 hours later text message donations to The American Red Cross Alone totaled roughly $3.4 million. And they did it by putting a big, red “easy” button in front of the world and asking everyone to push it. “That was easy!”

This campaign is a perfect reminder of keeping things simple for the user, a primary concern with each of our projects. That goes for laying out site navigation, designing forms, building a new e-commerce site, or whatever the project may be.

For example, let’s say you are a B2B company, and one of the primary goals for your site is to produce sales leads via an “I want to hire Company X” form. Let’s say to get to that form a user goes through a splash page, your home page, an About Us page, a Contact Us page, and when they finally find the form, there are 10 fields worth of info to fill out (I don’t need to know your maiden name or your birthday to do business with you). If that’s the only path for the user, the task of getting there alone will cause you to lose leads... make it easy to find, and easy to fill out.

If The Red Cross’s big push for donations asked people to say… provide a credit card number over the phone or get on the Web and fill out a long form, the campaign wouldn’t have been nearly as successful. Everyone responded so fast and in large numbers because it was a no brainer. And with an increasing number of smartphones on the market, many could see the call to action from any number of sources right on their mobile (email, Twitter , Facebook, news apps) and respond instantly.

There are a lot of smart, capable and (as we’re seeing in this whole relief response) generous people in the world, but that doesn’t mean you need to make things difficult for them.