CaringBridge: A Model for Mobile Giving

It took CaringBridge 14 years to grow into a respected name among online charities, with a loyal following and donations projected to hit $11 million this year.

But to continue growing, the Eagan, Minnesota, nonprofit provider of free websites for families facing a medical crisis needs to step into the new world of mobile giving. “More and more people are using mobile devices to access the Internet,” says Sona Mehring CaringBridge’s founder and CEO. “If we want to stay relevant to our current and future donor base, we have to make that journey with them.”

CaringBridge isn’t the only charity navigating an increasingly mobile world. Just as the Internet opened up new fundraising opportunities for nonprofit organizations a decade ago, mobile is becoming the leading-edge platform for drawing the next generation of charitable givers.

“The power of mobile for charitable giving is huge,” says Jim Manis, CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation, a Seattle nonprofit that helps charities devise mobile giving strategies. “There is no better interactive medium for engaging donors.”

A successful mobile giving campaign takes careful planning, knowledge of mobile infrastructure, and a clear understanding of how users interact with their devices. “The frustration occurs when charities think the same rules apply to mobile that apply on the Web,” Manis says.

In the past 18 months, CaringBridge has faced that frustration as it slowly reinvents itself for a mobile audience.

No Roadmap
Mehring created CaringBridge in 1997 after building a website for a friend who’d recently given birth to a premature baby. “It was a single spot where she could tell people what was going on with the baby, and people could leave messages of support,” Mehring says.

Today, the organization is supported entirely by donations, most of which come in small amounts through its website. Of 42 million unique visitors to the group’s website in the last 12 months, 90,000 made donations averaging $65 per donor. Although donations have grown 20 percent a year, the organization is constantly trying to increase those numbers.

The current strategy is to do that through mobile donations. But making the transition has been a challenge, says Gary Ablan, CaringBridge’s vice president of technology. Creating an effective mobile giving platform takes more than simply porting an online donation page to a mobile screen. It requires a different user interface technology, Ablan says. “It’s a smaller space to navigate, and users have less patience for filling out forms with mobile devices.”

CaringBridge began the transition in 2010, introducing iPhone and Android apps, plus a mobile site that lets people visit but not build a personal page or make a donation.

Ablan quickly discovered he didn’t have as much time as he thought he would to ponder his next move.

Ablan had predicted that it would take until 2019 for half the site’s traffic to come from mobile. That changed one month after they launched the mobile tools, when it became clear that more visitors than expected were discovering CaringBridge from their smartphones. “Now we are less than 24 months away” from hitting the 50 percent mark, he says.

To tap the potential of its ballooning mobile population, CaringBridge adopted a more aggressive mobile donation strategy.

When Ablan’s team looked for web-based charities they could use as models, they couldn’t find any generating steady donations from mobile giving. They did find several successful text-to-donate campaigns for one-time events, such as Wyclef Jean’s Twitter-driven call for contributions after the Haiti earthquake.

But CaringBridge opted against text-based giving. “Text is too transactional,” says Carolyn Egeberg, CaringBridge’s vice president of development. “We wanted to enable users to give while they are engaging in the CaringBridge experience.”

Instead, the charity built a simple form for its mobile site that asks prospective donors for the minimum information necessary to process a mobile donation: name, address, credit or charge card number and dollar amount.

The Elusive Mobile Donor
CaringBridge is still trying to figure out who its mobile donors will be. Today, the group’s donors are primarily women in their 40s. But research shows that Millennials, currently ages 11 to 30, will make up the bulk of mobile givers in the coming years. “Millennials have the same propensity to give as older generations and they live in the mobile environment,” Mehring says. “There are huge opportunities there if you can engage them.”

Understanding who donates and what spurs them to give is vital, Egeberg says, because even the best mobile technology won’t deliver if it targets the wrong audience. She learned that from the experience of a fellow Minnesota charity. In 2010, that organization sponsored a text-to-donate campaign during a Twin Cities sporting event with 80,000 participants. The organization spent thousands of dollars on the campaign but yielded just $65 in donations. “The lesson was clear,” Egeberg says. “Just because you have a captive audience doesn’t mean they are potential donors.”

Along with targeting the right donors, CaringBridge also has to ensure its mobile campaign adheres to the organization’s core approach to donations. Invitations to give must be small and unobtrusive so they don’t interfere with the overall experience, Egeberg says. At the same time, requests can’t be too subtle or they won’t be effective. Balancing financial goals with that respect for privacy is a constant challenge, regardless of the platform, she says.

To manage that balancing act, Ablan conducts comparison tests of donation icons and language on the charity’s website and mobile apps. He also reviews donor surveys and feedback about language, placement and look and feel of its donation requests. By measuring the impact of small changes, he can determine what kinds of requests generate the best results.

‘A Learning Year for Us’
CaringBridge launched its mobile giving option in early 2011, along with other features that the nonprofit’s development team hopes will increase mobile traffic. Those features include tools for building personal CaringBridge personal websites, adding photos and video or integrating them with Facebook - all from a smartphone. The company declined to disclose how much was spent on upgrades.

Now they’re measuring user response. “This is a learning year for us,” says Egeberg, the group’s development vice president. She expects mobile donations to represent thousands of dollars in 2011, a tiny fraction of CaringBridge’s overall annual collections. But she anticipates steady growth in coming years.

CaringBridge founder Mehring expects the same outcomes for other web-based charities that invest time and resources into mobile giving campaigns. “Mobile is a new frontier that is important for our future,” she says. “There is still a lot to discover, but it’s absolutely necessary for us -- or any nonprofit -- to do the work so we can continue to engage charitable givers.”