My charity mobile idea – child sponsorship via mobile

Now and again I buy a paper or a magazine which, generally speaking, I’m sat on the train reading.  A piece of paper will routinely fall out and now and again it’ll be a child sponsorship flyer.  You know the ones I mean I’m sure.  Various charities offer you the ability to pay a tenner or £20 a month to sponsor a child in one of the world’s hotspots.  You sign up, they send you a letter and some pictures from the child — it works well.  Quite a few of my colleagues do this.  I, myself, just give lump sums directly to places in and around Africa.

However I’ve never sponsored a child because, whenever I find a form that’s dropped out of a newspaper, I am not in the buying mood.  I never have the patience to sit there with a pen — a pen of all things — and then hunt for my bank details, fill in all the bits — all on a crowded commuter train.  I tried it once and got quite a few glares and small noises of annoyance from the folk squeezed in on the seats around me.  Filling in intricate boxes on a train bouncing all over the place isn’t that easy.

Put in perspective, that’s a ridiculous viewpoint.  Here am I making stupid excuses and there’s a child without a sponsor as a result.   It’s not good enough.  But it’s reality.  The heirarchy of needs.  Everyone on the carriage was stressed about the Monday morning commute.  Half of them had got child sponsorship flyers with their newspaper.  All could easily afford a tenner a month.  No one bothered to fill them in.  Quite a few were discarded on the floor. 

I felt an ounce of gilt as I stuffed the flyer into the rubbish bin and proceeded on to join the stressed throngs — the gilt mitigated by the personal knowledge of other charity donations that I make.

Quickly, though, as I sat on the tube, I got angry.  Not with the child sponsor people.  Nor the ignoring masses.  But with the child sponsor marketing people.

What idiot…  What absolutely idiot puts a flyer like that in a newspaper which is going to be read by a stressed, self-centred, self-obsessed commuter?   What idiot expects anyone when hit with the opportunity to subscribe?   You want me to spend 10 minutes filling in the form?  Then I have to POST it?  Find a what? A POST BOX?   TOOO much hassle. 

Sad.  Sad but true.  That’s the reality.  It’s far too easy for me to be properly self obsessed worrying if I’ll get to the meeting on time or not. 

Now, of course, if the newspaper arrived on my kitchen table and I was sat doing nothing and there was a pen handy… different viewpoint.

I was angry, but I’m laden with experience and a desire to do things and fix things.  So I set my mind at work.  Here’s what I came up with.  I’ve never seen it done before, so I’d really appreciate everyone’s perspective. 

First, have a look at this (click to enlarge):

When I got back to my desk, I knocked up this poster in Powerpoint.  I used the Worldvision branding as I thought I’d pitch the concept to them first.

That creative is intended for display on one of those huge 10ft wide posters at Billericay train station — and every other fat-with-city-cash commuter train station in the home counties.  The concept is this: You see the poster and you’re invited to help a child by paying £1.50 a week to receive a weekly news update about him or her.   Of course, £1.50 is a bit over the odds, but you accept this, because you’re giving back, in a small and easy way.  In total that’ll be £6 a month, roughly speaking.  Nothing.  Nothing when you blow £3 on a ringtone.  Nothing when, in reality, it’s your company that pays the bill. 

So when you’re sat there on Monday morning, packed into the commuter train, worrying about why your life is so shit, whether you should move to that bigger place, whether you’ll get a decent bonus this year or if you should go to the gym more often — you’ll get interrupted by a text message letting you know how little Sophie is getting on somewhere in Africa. 

I reckoned the updates could be something like: 

Hi there — last week, Sophie had her first day at school. She was very excited to begin learning maths, English and meet her school teacher and new friends.  Next week, we’ll be sending a photo!

Something like that.  Really easy to produce for the Charity as they’d only need to do this for say three children.

I put three children on the creative to:

a) give some choice.  You might want to pick a boy or a girl to ‘sponsor’.
b) maximise revenue. You might want to hear from all three. 
c) demonstrate a range of children needing help.

In a world of self obsession, I think a service like this could be extremely popular.  It’s really simple for the Charity to deliver too.  They could even store updates for a few weeks — all they need to do is send out 160 characters, so it should be straight forward for them to phone their local people on the ground to get regular updates to send to everyone.

Now, let’s talk the money bit.  This is what got me quite excited.  So there’s a cost for posters. But I think that cost could be easily covered by the take-up of the service.

Let’s talk numbers.

So, if you can get 10,000 people subscribed in a week… which, I dunno, I don’t think that’s difficult if you’ve got some good posters, let’s look at the money:

10,000 x £1.50 = £15,000 gross.

Now, let’s assume you can get 70p after VAT from every message after the mobile operators have nailed you?  Just roughly.

10,000 x £0.70 = £7,000

That’s per week.  So what’s this per month? 

£7k x 52 weeks / 12 months = £33,000 per month or £364,000 a year.

From just 10,000 subscribers.

I think if the Metro newspaper did a feature on it or if you advertised on the underground or the like, you could get a ton of people subscribed.

If you can get 60,000 subscribers to the service, you’ve got yourself a £2m+ revenue stream per year. 

I was so excited.  I knew that we could build and operate the technology for the charity at no cost whatsoever to them.  It wouldn’t require much of our resource to build the system.  So with the aid of a quick keyword from iTAGG, we built the system.  I also reckoned that, once it was a bit successful, the iTAGG team or another aggregator would do a good deal so that the outpayments would be raised higher.
But essentially, we could go live more or less tomorrow.

So, I knocked up that creative and I got on the phone and email.

Nothing.  I managed to talk to a Worldvision chap by email once or twice.  No interest.  Sent mails to all the big charities.  Nothing.

Nothing at all.

I was crestfallen.  I was incredulous!  I was totally taken aback.  I couldn’t see what was wrong with the picture.   Using our consumer mobile experience (of  which we have a proven track record) I could see that this could be a potentially huge moneyspinner for the charities.   But I couldn’t exactly start the service on my own without a charity backing me.  I shelved the idea.   This was 2.5 almost three years ago. 

So, tell me what you think?  I’d very much appreciate your perspectives on the concept.  Has anyone seen this done, anywhere?  Did it work?   Do you think it would work?