Smart Apps for Smart Nonprofits

Mashable has a great article this week about how the nonprofit community is using mobile applications. Geoff Livingston interviewed a veritable thunder of leaders in the nonprofit tech world, including TechSoup Global co-CEO Marnie Webb as well as Ben Rigby, NTEN's Holly Ross, and CauseWorld's Cyriac Roeding.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about Apple's control over iPhone and iPad apps. In an already-infamous email exchange last month, Steve Jobs promised the world "freedom from porn." Political cartoonists have criticized an apparent lack of clarity in Apple's standards for "objectionable" content. In an excellent piece for this month's Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn posits that paid apps are ending the idealistic vision of a free Internet.

Some people in the nonprofit community have questioned why Apple doesn't allow nonprofit apps to solicit donations from users. Those criticisms are best summarized in this recent editorial by Jake Shapiro of Public Radio Exchange, designers of (among others) This American Life's popular iPhone app:

The excuse that "Apple doesn't want to be held responsible for ensuring that the charitable funds make it to the final destination" is a cop-out. Google Grants has tackled this already, and organizations like TechSoup and Guidestar do a sophisticated job of authenticating nonprofits and charities worldwide. Apple, of all companies, can't credibly say it's not up to the technical and logistical challenge.

And Apple is not just preventing app developers from putting "donate" buttons or any language suggesting that users contribute to charitable causes; it is also cutting off nonprofits from the most powerful direct-payment platform in the mobile marketplace. 1-Click payments are transformative for direct giving, and Apple has tens of millions of users with stored credit cards already accustomed to instant purchases ' over 100 million if you add in iTunes users worldwide.

I suspect the deeper reasons for Apple's uncharitable stance is that the nonprofit and education markets are just that — "markets" that represent hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue to Apple in the form of computer, software, iPod, and now iPhone and iPad sales.

There is no financial upside for Apple to enable a direct path for nonprofit and charitable support. And note that there is no "Apple Foundation," no "Apple Grants." In fact, Apple has been called out as one of America's least philanthropic companies. It's also one that just passed Microsoft's market capitalization as the most valuable technology company in the world.

As Marnie pointed out in the Mashable interview, although the iPhone and iPad aren't ideal as donations platforms, that doesn't mean they can't offer a lot of value to the nonprofit sector in action and engagement: "The Extraordinaries are a great example of how to use this type of platform. Their basic model, which harnesses the energy of many people to help solve a problem ' whether it's identifying missing people or tagging photos from museums ' is one that other non-profits could easily use. The difficulty is that it requires nonprofit organizations to think about volunteerism very differently than they have for the past 200 years or so."

We've discussed The Extraordinaries here before. Its microvolunteering platform was one of the apps that TechSoup's Rachel Weidinger profiled in her South by Southwest presentation, Handheld Awesome Detectors. In the Mashable interview, Extraordinaries founder Ben Rigby showed disappointment in Apple's no-donation policy, but he stressed that that doesn't mean nonprofits can't use mobile apps for real-world change. "[The policy] makes it exceedingly difficult for a nonprofit to make use of the platform. However, we also need to think about the future ' and the future will [offer] more immersive devices that make the data around us accessible in many ways … and right now, iPhone is dominating the field of 'ubiquitous data' so we should work now to make sure it's going to work for nonprofits in the future."

Having said that, Ben was also quick to acknowledge that the audience for smartphone apps is still limited. "You shouldn't even think of building an app before you've considered a text messaging strategy. Texting is much more popular, cheaper to implement, and there are many success stories. It's the first place to go mobile."

I agree, and I think that as a sector, it behooves us to make sure that our tools are accessible to the people we're serving. A few weeks ago, I lamented that so much of the open-government movement is focused on iPhone apps, when voice-and-SMS-based apps could serve so many more people, particularly disadvantaged people. As we move from thinking of mobile technologies as marketing and fundraising tools to thinking of them as programmatic tools, we should take care that we don't leave behind the people who need our services the most.

Related

• Open311: What Nonprofits and Public Libraries Can Gain from Open Government
• Text Message Donations for Haiti Top $37 Million
• The Extraordinaries and Ushahidi Using Technology to Help in Haiti
• Micro-Donations, Crowd-Sourcing, Radical Collaborations, and Mobile Tech
• Fundraising Facts
• Cn U Raise $ Via Txt?

Photo: Dave Pearson, CC license

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