Sms donation

This year, Danmarks Indsamling, an annual fund raising event organised jointly by 12 major charities in Denmark, broke all records, thanks in part to the thousands of Danes who chose to donate money by text messaging. In total, text message donations helped raise tens of millions of kroner for the twelve Danish charity organisations behind Danmarks Indsamling.

Once again, Danmarks Indsamling set new records for the amount of money donated by the Danish public when the huge gala show was held on 24 January this year. And, according to Stig Fog, who is Project Manager for Danmarks Indsamling, this success can, in part, be explained largely by the fact that the Danish public took the opportunity to donate money, via text messaging, to their hearts.

“The biggest advantage of the text messaging medium is that it is so easily accessible. It is so easy to send a text message because people always have their mobile phone to hand and there is no need for them to move away from the television. This means that very little time passes between the thought of contributing money and actually doing it when people want to make a contribution to Danmarks Indsamling.”

Numerous channels

It was Unwire who developed the technical platform used by Danmarks Indsamling to facilitate the huge number of text message donations. And, for the very first time this year, Danmarks Indsamling was organised in such a way that it was possible for the public to donate money in the weeks running up to the show as well as during the show itself.

Thus, on the evening of the fund raising gala itself, it was possible to send a text message and donate DKK 150 or make a contribution of DKK 10 by participating in one of the show’s quizzes. in the weeks running up to the show, Danes could give DKK 10 by, for instance, taking part in a tombola draw on Adam and Sarah’s morning show on P3 or by voting for their favourite video made by lower secondary school pupils in support of the event and uploaded to YouTube.

”The use of text messaging is an area that can be associated with numerous sources of error. Since it is extremely important to us that all the text messages reach us, this year, like last year, we used Unwire as the supplier because they take their work incredibly seriously and have a remarkably high level of operational reliability,” says Stig Fog.

Competent advice is crucial

He goes on to tell us that Unwire contributed with input into how the actual concept for Danmarks Indsamling could be best put together within the framework of the existing rules governing the telecommunications sector.

”The framework agreement between the various telecommunications operators limits the ways in which you can go about collecting money. Among these are rules relating to the amount of money you can donate and the number of times you can make a donation in the course of a day. Therefore, we started the process with Unwire by interpreting the framework agreement in such a way as to find out how we could get as much out of the fund raising event as possible,” says Stig Fog.

Text messaging reduces losses

He adds that had it not been for the framework agreement, ideally he would have made even more use of text messaging for fund raising. Compared with ordinary telephone contributions, not one single contribution was lost as a result of people having to wait in a queue to get on the line.