More than 50% of young Americans have smart phones pewinternet.org
So I think Square and Clouds will matter more and more - what do you think?
Re: Technology and Philanthropy
I remain very skeptical that mobile payments matter much at all in this context. The last 30 years are replete with financial innovations that experience either slow or limited take-up. For instance the "smart" credit card was the "next big thing" for almost 20 years.
The only payment technology that experienced rapid adoption over this timeframe is ATM cards, but those solved a very obvious problem and were piggy-backing on an existing infrastructure. Remember that widespread use of credit cards took decades. Also keep in mind that web-based banking, online bill pay and personal financial software all have relatively modest rates of adoption and none show any effect on macro-level usage behavior.
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Other factors to consider:
1) mobile payments are not materially different than credit card payments or PayPal payments. This transition is likely to be the same as from checks to credit cards in terms of impact: important to the back-end but immaterial to end results.
2) The use case in giving is for instant response giving. Very few organizations can make a compelling case for why giving RIGHT NOW matters.
3) Impulse giving, when it can be induced, could very well depress total giving. That's a clear possibility from the Pew Haiti research and from ongoing work on embedded giving.
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I appreciate your well-founded skepticism. But I disagree with two core assumptions - 1, Square solves a real problem for small organizations/individuals - the cost of taking credit cards. It's so much cheaper than the alternatives that it makes new things possible. The counter-argument here might be PayPal, which is also inexpensive for merchants, but bc it's not linked to credit cards requires too much behavior change. Second - I agree that this is "back end" change, it's all about payments. But there's a linking of the money & data that these mobile payment systems make possible, & that we're now poised to expect, that I think is different. All available together in the handy smart phones that we're almost all carrying around with us.
Tim
That said, you raise a key point - all this change that I'm talking about here is back end - transactional, processing, engagement, tracking. I think it has front end implications (meaning more impact or at least better tracked impact) but I haven't gotten there yet....thanks for the prompt
Lucy
I think the mismatch there is that the orgs that will benefit from Square (small, start-up, crisiscampstyle) are unlikely to be the ones with the time, money or skills to do anything with the data.
And consumers/givers have shown remarkable consistency in their ability to ignore existing data streams about their finances which would lead to smarter decisions.
Aha! But this is where I think we're in a new space - we can and do manage data and make decisions off of it all the time - once the hard work of gathering and organizing has been done. Think traffic, weather, ingredients, bills, etc....As @Kanter says "Spend more time thinking about your data then collecting it" - and that's the era we're now in - the data are collected, cleaned and presented to us, via the phone/mobile payment system. It's our turn to build "sensemaking" on top of it - which we're actually quite good at doing.
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This is, btw, also why these kinds of payment systems should allow for whole new kinds of automated pay/report relationships between funders and doers....
As for "ignoring data stream to be smarter..." - well, I never claimed it would make anyone smarter, just that it would change how we work.....(smile)
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