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02/12/2011 -
M-commerce and mobile payment services tend to focus on sales and consumer-based monetary transactions. After all, consumerism is the whole point of using mobile payment. Isn't it?Increasingly, consumers are using m-commerce technology to do something else: give. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti elicited hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from consumers using their mobile devices to literally "text" small sums to humanitarian groups.
This holiday season, the Salvation Army is using technology that allows donors to swipe their credit cards through devices attached to a mobile phone, thereby optimizing payment processing for the sake of ease and simplicity.
"The minister will say, 'Normally I tell you to turn off your cellphone in church, but now you can turn it on' to pledge," Douglas Plank, CEO of MobileCause, which has sponsored several mobile pledging tests, told ComputerWorld.
"People forget to bring their checkbooks, so using the phone makes sense," he added. "The ministries that have tested it see a 10 percent to 15 percent bump in giving when they do it."
Experts also expect such giving methods to soar once more mobile payment services and technologies hit the market.
