Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City adds texting to its fund-raising picture
Kansas City Business Journal - by David Twiddy Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2010
The Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City is turning to mobile phones to raise money.
This month, the council began an awareness campaign as it seeks to generate $470,000, or about a third of its annual $1.7 million budget. The campaign, aimed at suggesting what Kansas City would be without art, includes largely blank billboards and covering pieces of public art in white wrap.
Supporters can pledge donations by texting “ARTSKC” to 32075. The mobile phone user receives a text confirming their original message and providing an Arts Council phone number and Web site to complete the donation.
“We’re always interested in making it as easy as possible for people to give,” CEO Harlan Brownlee said. “In that public campaign, we realized it would be easier and simpler if we could add a texting option.”
Although using text messages for donations has been available since 2007, it came of age after the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti. A well-publicized texting effort helped the American Red Cross raise tens of millions of dollars as phone users sent texts that added a $10 donation to their phone bills.
Overland Park-based Moblico Solutions is providing the technical support for the Arts Council’s effort, its first foray into text-based giving, CEO Pierre Barbeau said.
Barbeau said the Haiti model, while successful, has drawbacks, such as limiting donations to $5 or $10 and forcing a charity to wait as many as 90 days while the wireless carrier processes payments.
“We developed for ArtsKC a solution that doesn’t have those limitations,” Barbeau said.
A study by Washington-based consulting firm M R Strategic Services said it’s too early to tell how successful texting can be for raising money aside from emergency situations. But it said that, because of the ubiquity of mobile phones, texting “can serve as a key part of a broader communications strategy.”
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Kansas City has used texting for donations since December 2008 and has raised less than $1,000 that way, development director Patrick Sallee said. But he said the organization still is experimenting with how to get the word out on how the texting effort works.
“For us, we’re still approaching it as an event-based tool versus a daily tool,” he said.
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