Mobiles: use continues to grow
Convention is told the number of mobile device users will overtake the number of desktop computer users in five years
Charities are missing out on donations by failing to optimise their websites for mobile devices, delegates will be told today.
In the session The Latest Digital Fundraising Trends, Jonathan Waddingham, product manager of the donations service JustGiving, will say that the number of mobile device users will overtake the number of desktop computer users in five years, according to predictions from Morgan Stanley Research.
Speaking ahead of the session, Waddingham told Convention News: "We find that most charities’ websites are not optimised, so it’s hard to make a donation from a mobile device." He suggested charities could be missing out on a quarter of potential donations made by mobile – or 5 per cent of total donations – because their sites were not optimised.
Waddingham will tell delegates that visits to JustGiving’s website using mobile devices have grown from 6 per cent of the total in April 2010 to 32 per cent in April 2012. This has been driven in particular by social media, such as Facebook, he said.
In another talk, The Future of Facebook Fundraising, Waddingham will say that JustGiving expects to get half its donations through Facebook by 2015. It raised £22m from more than a million donors who visited JustGiving from the social networking site in 2011. He will say that enabling Facebook users to share donations with friends can help charities to raise extra cash.
"We improved the site in September last year to encourage more people to share their donations, and between then and April we saw more than £1m in extra donations," he said.
Microblogs on JustGiving’s site, shared through Facebook, raised up to £12 a share in extra donations.
JustGiving has built an application to allow Facebook users to share their donations with friends through a new feature, called Timeline, which allows users to gather content from other applications on their Facebook pages.
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