Mobile Technologies for Non-profit Organization

Chebagogo (www.chebagogofoundation.org) is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing education, housing, healthcare, and career opportunities to AIDS orphans in Kenya. The organization was founded in 2006 with only a small farming land, and a few cows and chickens in order to feed and raise the children. Today, from its farming operations, Chebagogo has been a self-sustaining organization for the life of eight children. However, with more than 200 kids on the waitlist, the journey is still far from over for Chebagogo foundation. The organization’s long-term goal is to be able to purchase parcels of land, to build infrastructures, and to begin the act of providing and educating children in its own facilities. In order to realize this goal, the organization needs to gather more donations from people and more importantly to spread out the words about the organization and its missions. For this purpose, I would like to propose the use of some of the available mobile technologies to help the organization to spread its wings.

The first mobile technology that I would like to propose to the organization is the use of text-to-give. This will make the donations-giving process simpler and easier. In addition, this technology should be accompanied by text alerts, which can simply be weekly or bi-weekly short updates about the organization with a link to the organization’s mobile website. Not only this will provide users with updates about the organization, but also an easy tool to share the information to others.

Twitter and Facebook are two commons social networking tools that are used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. The utilization of these two tools will ensure the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing for the organization. Furthermore, these two tools are widely available on various mobile platforms that will make easier for people to find updates about the organization and in the same time to increase the organization’s existence in the online world. Finally, linking these two sites with the organization’s current website will give the website users a simple way of sharing what they see on their own Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The last, but not least, mobile technology that can benefit the organization is the RSS feed. RSS, which stands for RDF Site Summary, is a web syndication technology that provides people with the latest updates on the organization’s website. The RSS feed can be read by using a software called RSS reader that can be web-based, desktop-based, and mobile-device-based. This web syndication can benefit both the organization and the users. While the users are benefited through instant updates, the organization receives exposure across numerous online platforms, which will generate traffic for the website.