World wide SMS auction spells a Winner for UNICEF

Posted by Francis Lim on March 15th, 2005 at 05:18am

While some charities have relied on live auctions, silent auctions, online auctions as a staple of their fundraising efforts, there is a new choice to add to the auction mix; SMS. An SMS auction, allows participants to key in their bids via text message.

In February 2005, the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) Association and their partners hosted an international text messaging auction with the proceeds directed to UNICEF. Bidding commenced on January 24 and ran until February 17th. To sign-up for the auction, participants texted a registration message. To enter a bid the registrants would key in the auction code (e.g. FILM) with their bid amount. In this case, there was no premium rate charged for any of the bids sent. The text bids were received from six different continents, and over €90,000 was raised for UNICEF in combination with a live auction.

This charity auction is a promising start to opening channels for charities and constituents to communicatie by SMS. In order to take advantage of SMS functionality, charities need to start collecting supporter cellphone numbers. In this regard, it is becoming increasingly important to look at how to provide value added incentives for new or existing SMS charity supporters. An auction is one example of how this could pay off for a charity.

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