How To Use Your Mobile App For Charity

Whether you run a company looking to increase its philanthropic contributions or a non-profit looking to increase its donations, designing a mobile app can certainly accomplish such charitable aspirations. In some regards, asking for donations is not much different than selling a product or service. Naturally, it makes sense that you would use the same advances in mobile technology to do so. Through the creation of a mobile application, your organization has the ability to target market the demographics that you feel will provide larger and more frequent donations, and do so in a fun, yet effective way of using mobile technology. For those looking to implement their existing mobile app for charitable purposes, or perhaps create a new mobile offering specifically for receiving donations, here are some things to consider.

Receiving Donations

Asking for donations can be a very humbling experience, but doing so through a mobile app makes the process much easier and more detached. While there is almost always an aspect of selling involved in asking for money, using a mobile app to receive donations lets mobile technology handle selling users on your cause. Furthermore, there are two main methods of receiving donations through a mobile app. You can either offer a paid app and send the profits to charity, or you can make a free app and ask for donations once users downloaded it.

1. Offering A Free App

Offering your charitable mobile app free to customers is an effective way to get them to hear your message without requiring a commitment. In many cases, this is the most effective way of garnering donations through a mobile app. This is primarily because once users have downloaded your app they are more likely to donate since it is already on their mobile device. In other words, a user is less likely to download your app if they don’t plan to donate to your cause at some point.    

2. Offering A Paid App

Conversely, you can offer a paid app with the proceeds automatically going to charity or your philanthropic organization. Whether you price your app at $0.99 or $9.99, that money will go directly towards the cause of your organization. In addition, offering a paid app allows you to ask for further donations once users have downloaded it onto their mobile devices. 

3. Using A Third Party

Once you have decided how to ask for your donations, the question then becomes how to receive them. There are a number of third party vendors that make doing so possible, such as PayPal. However, some still take a cut of the donations. Ultimately it is up to you to decide whether it is worth having another company take a portion of a user donation that is supposed to solely go to charity.

Conclusion

Without question, using mobile technology to better a charitable cause is an admirable method of reaching out for donations. In doing so, whether you decide to offer your app free or paid is a choice that can potentially make the difference in the overall donations you receive, so be sure to consider the pros and cons of each option. Additionally, if you are considering using a third party company to process the donations, it is important to not only expect them to take a portion of the money, but you should also inform your users that not all of their donations will be going to the charitable cause they intended.