One of the roles I have picked up at Amnesty is helping to coordinate an intranet resource on online fundraising. One of the items that has landed on my desk, and is worth sharing is news about the SMS activism program that Amnesty Norway has been running.
The concept is simple enough - Amnesty Norway has recruited about 25,000 people who have signed up to receive SMS notices when there is an urgent action alert - about twice a month. Every time an alert is sent out, each subscriber pays 0.25 euros (so it costs about 0.50 euros each month, or about 6 Euros a year to stay on the list). Each time that someone responds to an urgent action note - about 10,000 do each time - then they pay another 0.25 euros. Amnesty Norway recieves about 50% of all the SMS fees, so this program not only generates Urgent Action signatures, it also generates a surprisingly large amount of income to fund Amnesty’s programs - about 100,000 Euros per year. It’s a real example of the cummulative nature of small (in this case, micro) donations.
If your Norwegian is up to scratch, check out AI Norway’s SMS Activism page for more details ..
George - great post. Thanks for this! Will you (or can I) repost on/feed to http://www.MobileActive.org?
Hope you are well, and glad to have discovered your blog!
Katrin
Comment by kverclas — May 23, 2006 @ 4:47 pm