Charities and mobile... a difficult deal?

I’ve had quite a few comments from my post earlier today about my premium revenue idea for charities.

This comment, sent in on condition of anonymity, was rather incisive:

We did something similar in 2005, we created a whole mobile delivery platform for charities.

The idea was simple, sell mobile content on a website and donate the proceeds. (All this was before problems with ringtone subscriptions occurred.)

Users would visit the site, purchase a ringtone and then select a charity they would like the proceeds to go to. Idea was simple and effective. The site created an awareness and educated the youth market of what the charities did and their aims etc.

Out of each sale we would donate all proceeds to the charities that had signed up etc.

We contacted numerous charities, big and small … but nothing. We had meetings but again nothing.

Charities just were not willing to associate themselves with the mobile industry. In one meeting, the representative said that the charity would not be willing to participate because phones may cause brain cancer. In another meeting we were asked to donate 100,000  to the charity if we wanted them to join. But there was no promise they would tell their audience about it.

I found it so frustrating that we created something so simple and promising but the charities were not even prepared to give it a go. At the end of the day, the charities goals are the help those that need their help … period … and like you we just provided a tool for them to use. The tool would help raise money and more importantly connect charities with the youth market who would learn about them and their aims. It will be the youth market who will be donating in 10-20 years time.

In the end we close down the site because there were no takers. It is a shame, but I walked away knowing one thing… a charity is no different from any other corporation … money, red tape, politics play a huge role.

I think I would have had to reach across the desk and slap this chap with a huge wet fish if someone had made this remark to me:

In one meeting, the representative said that the charity would not be
willing to participate because phones may cause brain cancer.