Nonprofit Mobile App Trends & Uses

The following post is an adaptation of a presentation, How Mobile is Changing Content and What it Means for Businesses and Nonprofits, given by Luminate Marketing at the 2011 Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago.

MOBILE MARKETING TODAY

Marketing bloggers and observers have been predicting and proclaiming “the year of mobile” for years. Let’s step back from predictions and look at what’s happening now in mobile marketing and how we can make the most of it.

The reality is, we’ve seen mobile marketing help our clients immensely and really get them on the map. No small part of this has been the accelerated adoption of smartphone technology. Currently, 37% of US mobile phone users own a smart phone — [that’s] nearly 90 million users. Regardless of if we’ve seen the year of mobile or if it’s still in the future, these numbers present a real opportunity, now.

5 IMPACTS OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

Mobile technology has certainly made its impact on the marketing industry. For businesses and nonprofits alike, we are seeing:

 1. Localization

Search on mobile is increasingly local; mobile devices allow for a more relevant content experience including check-ins for businesses and location-based searches for nearby services for nonprofits.

2. Immediacy

We now have the ability to provide timely content, that otherwise would be less valuable if you had to wait for user to get back to a desktop. For business – offerings like Groupon Now, deals you can use in the next two hours; for nonprofits informing donors of immediate needs for resources, volunteers, etc.

 3. Shareability

Content served in the mobile environment have an incredible opportunity to be shared with users’ networks. Mobile devices have become a hub for social sharing, and that’s not industry or sector specific.

 4. Media Mobility

We now have the ability to create and view nearly all media from just about anywhere.  See below for a more detailed look at this impact.

 5. Divergent Platforms

With the previous 4 positive impacts comes this challenge. Marketers have to account for variability in users’ devices and feature compatibility. We have to decide which platform and which features are most important to our users and constituents and prioritize development. We can’t provide everyone with everything.

MEDIA MOBILITY, THE CENTER OF IT ALL

The mobility of media is at the center of all of these. Without content to distribute immediately that’s worthy of sharing, location-aware, and optimized for our chosen platform(s), the entire process would be sunk. Specially let’s look at the overlap between the two sectors Luminate Marketing works in, the nonprofit and for-profit, and what businesses can learn from nonprofits taking advantage of mobile marketing today.

Message Reinforcement and Fresh Content – Nuru International

The video below shows the kind of content you can create with mobile devices and talks about other initiatives Nuru International is incorporating into their business through mobile.

Background: Nuru abolishes extreme poverty in a community within 5 years.  This is a video about how they’re using mobile to further their clean water and programs and training.

This is important for two reasons:

1. 95% of organizations have a philanthropic arm or corporate giving program. Videos like this one are sent back to the organization in the United States who can use that content along with pictures etc. to provide to their shareholders in the corporate newsletter or other collateral pieces. This helps solidify the program, gain additional funding, and strengthen the partnership between corporation and charity.
2. Creating opportunities for mobile-generated content throws the doors wide open for steady streams of fresh content. (More important now than ever as Google’s recent algorithm update indicates)

Conversion Tools – Breakthrough Urban Ministries