Could QR Codes be big for online fundraising?

Over the last few weeks I’ve started to see quite a few little black ‘maze’ icons (like the one above) on advertisements in papers and magazines here in the UK. While they may look like the latest evolution of the Sudoku puzzle craze, they are actually QR Codes (QR = Quick Response) - basically bar codes containing details of a web address, which can be read by your mobile phone (if you have the right software installed). This one is actually the QR Code representation of the home URL for this blog.

You point the camera of your mobile phone at the code and the software translates it into a message and web address and takes you directly to the advertisers website. No waiting to respond until you get to a computer; no searching the phone’s menus for the internet browser; no URL to enter using your tiny phone keypad. If you can scan it, you can go straight to the site. Sounds like a direct response advertisers dream!

Thinking about it from the fundraising perspective, right now my daily papers are carrying a range of different ads requesting donations in support of either the Burma Cyclone or China Earthquake emergency appeals. In most cases the response options offered are threefold: a traditional coupon, a credit card donation line (not always 24hr), and a URL. It’s pretty easy to see how in the future a QR Code, taking the reader direct to a mobile web donation page could streamline online response to such emergency ads. Read, scan, click, donation made - nice!

Over recent years there’s been a whole lot of discussion about the exciting future of the mobile internet, so the big question is just when we might start to see QR Codes being used in this way by fundraisers?

I first heard of QR Codes from one of our other planners at WWAV Rapp Collins, who had seen them all over the place during a trip to Japan back in August 2007 and predicted that we’d see them all over the place here in the near future. Sure enough, in early December 2007 the UK’s highest circulation daily paper The Sun devoted several pages to explaining and promoting QR codes - presumably hoping to get ahead of the curve in offering this extra response option to its advertisers. By the end of the following month the paper was reporting that its new service was a ‘hit’, with some 11,000 users, and announced intentions to continue to promote the approach.

While UK advertisers are clearly starting to test the approach, not only in The Sun but in listings magazines like Time Out, it’s still early days - but the potential for this type of response mechanic seems obvious. The fundamental barrier to its adoption on a mass scale is simply the need to download the QR Code software. This is freely available from i-nigma, whose smartcode reader is one of the most widely used (you can also create your own smartcodes on their website). But the truth is that most mobile phone users probably wouldn’t know where to start when considering downloading extra software to their phone, so adoption based on this is likely to be slow and gradual.

However, all that we need is for the major handset manufacturers to start shipping phones with smartcode reader software pre-installed and this could go mass pretty quickly. We can be sure that commercial advertisers will leap on the opportunity as soon as it starts to scale-up- and switched-on fundraisers shouldn’t be far behind.

Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

I chose a broad and much discussed topic for my hosting of this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants: Creating and developing online communities through Web 2.0.

We kick-off with a very useful thought piece, originally guest posted by Beth Kanter on techsoup.org, entitled Determining Your Social Network Needs.

Then it’s over to Katya Andresen and Stacie Mann from Network for Good who offer a handy 11 Steps to success with Social Networking.

Staying with Social Networking, Josh Catone at Read Write Web marks Facebook’s fourth birthday earlier this month with a post considering whether Facebook might become a catalyst for wider social change.

On to a Social Network with a difference, NetSquared generated a load of discussion in response to its recent Think Tank question How Can Nonprofits use Twitter? - including the story of how the American Cancer Society is using twitter to promote its breast cancer research ‘Frozen Pea Fund’!

Joanne Fritz is struck by the potential to use Web 2.0 to engage with large numbers of donors giving small value gifts in her post The Long Tail of Fundraising: how small donations can make a difference.

Then we have a whole host of Web 2.0 Tech Tips from Social Signal - covering everything from blogging, del.icio.us, and RSS to advice on community content.

And finally a post from DonorPowerBlog by my old Seattle-based friend and colleague Jeff Brooks, with some suggestions on how to have Kiva’s problem - namely raising too much money!

That’s it for this week. But you can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants as it wends its weekly way across the blogosphere by subscribing to the carnival feed.

SMS fundraising ideas

If you’re interested in SMS fundraising then take a look at mobileactive.org, which promotes the use of mobile phones for all forms of civic action.

As well as providing lots of data relating to worldwide mobile phone use (usefully split by country) and a very active blog, you can also download a number of strategy guides - including one on using mobile phones in fundraising campaigns.

You need to register to use the site and download the guides, but it’s completely free and well worth a look if you’re thinking of adding mobile communications to your fundraising or advocacy programmes.

You might also have a think about the potential of t-shirts that text back - which I spotted a while ago.

Fashionable SMS fundraising

I originally mentioned this on livinginadigitalworld.com a couple of months back, but it’s such a fun idea that I thought it worth mentioning here too.

Reactee is a great online t-shirt site which not only offers shoppers the opportunity to share their views on any subject that takes their fancy through a personalised t-shirt - but takes t-shirt communication to a completely new level by creating clothing that “texts back”.

Every Reactee t-shirt displays the wearer’s personal slogan plus a keyword and SMS shortcode. Anyone interested in knowing more about the slogan - or the wearer - can text-in the keyword and will automatically receive a response set by the wearer. The responses can be updated as often as the wearer wants, and they receive a notification each time someone texts their t-shirt.

So far, Reactee t-shirt wearers apparently range from those just looking for a personal response (“Am I hot?” seems quite popular) to those wanting to raise awareness of charities or political campaigns. One young Democrat has created an “Obama for President” t-shirt and updates her text response each week with a new reason to support him.

Seems like there could be real potential for charities with their own shortcode services already in-place to replicate the idea in support of their own campaigning or fundraising.