I'm always curious to see how people respond to charitable causes when engaging with the mobile medium.
The RSPCA's campaign against fox hunting, which appeared in a couple of the nationals a fortnight ago, is not the first such initiative a charity has embarked on.
The first reverse-billed campaign ever to be run on a common short code across all four major operators in the UK was by a charity, Comic Relief, who have been successfully using mobile as a way to raise hard cash for 18 months now.
Amnesty International has also been a pioneer of the medium, conducting petitions and cleverly passing on a small charge to its members for each text message in order to make the activity self-funding.
For the RSPCA campaign, the simple mechanism that appeared in The Guardian and the Daily Mirror was an invitation to text in the keyword "cruel" to register support for the anti-fox hunting campaign.
Although the key objective behind the campaign was to test the effectiveness of mobile, the RSPCA and its agency PHD had already succeeded in creating awareness around its campaign through the adverts.
What the mobile element added was an opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of the media planning and also to allow a direct route for people to register their support for the charity - which received 10,000 responses.
The fact that 3,000 people signed up to receive ongoing updates from the RSPCA is proof that there is a solid group of supporters out there, waiting to be tapped into via text. The challenge ahead of the RSPCA now is to convert the rest of those people into regular supporters and to grow the database of supporters further.
.jpg)
.jpg)