33 Nonprofit Mobile Websites
[tweetmeme] One in four Americans now access the Mobile Web daily, yet only a tiny fraction of nonprofits have a mobile website. I have been watching this trend for almost two years now and there’s seemingly been almost no progress in the use of mobile websites by the nonprofit sector in that time which at this point leaves me mostly baffled. The rise of QR Codes has helped some nonprofits understand the need for at least mobile-optimized web pages. A QR code that launches a desktop-designed web page in a mobile browser just doesn’t make sense. Neither does linking to desktop sites inside smartphone apps, in group text alerts, or on location-based communities like Foursquare and Gowalla. That said, I am a firm believer that a mobile website is the building block upon which to center your other mobile campaigns, but since January 2010 when I first featured 10 Nonprofit Mobile Websites, there hasn’t been much progress made.
My hypothesis as to why nonprofits are falling behind is that they think that adopting the Mobile Web is expensive or time-consuming, or they equate the mobile technology solely with text-to-give. Well, early adoption of the Mobile is not expensive and text-to-give should definitely not be a nonprofit’s entry point into mobile technology. That said, I think the word is finally starting to trickle out that mobile campaigns can be done on a shoestring budget and are accessible to all nonprofits. If your nonprofit is considering tapping into mobile technology, my advice to you would be to start a with a mobile website and then expand from there. Here are 33 nonprofit mobile websites to help get your creativity flowing:
1. 350.0rg :: m.350.org
2. Best Friends Animal Society :: m.bestfriends.org
3. British Museum :: m.britishmuseum.org
4. Child Fund International :: m.childfund.org
5. Children’s Medical Center of Dayton :: m.childrensdayton.org
6. Concern Worldwide :: m.concern.net
7. Cyber Bulling UK :: m.cyberbullying.co.uk
8. Dallas Art Museum :: dallasmuseumofart.mobi
9. Feeding America :: m.feedingamerica.org
10. Goodwill Industries International :: m.goodwill.org
11. Harvard Business Review :: m.hbr.org
12. Humane Society of the United States :: m.humanesociety.org
13. Hollywood Bowl :: m.hollywoodbowl.com
14. Jimmy Fund :: m.jimmyfund.org
15. Metropolitan Opera :: m.metoperafamily.org
16. Monterey Bay Aquarium :: m.montereybayaquarium.org
17. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art :: nelson-atkins.org/mobileguide
18. Nature Conservancy :: m.nature.org
19. National Geographic :: m.nationalgeographic.com
20. National Public Radio :: m.npr.org
21. Oceana :: m.oceana.org
22. Planned Parenthood :: m.plannedparenthood.org
23. Prairie State Legal Services :: m.pslegal.org
24. San Diego Zoo :: m.sandiegozoo.org
25.Save the Children:: m.savethechildren.org
26. Sharp HealthCare :: m.sharp.com
27. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum :: mobile.nasm.si.edu
28. Smithsonian National Postal Museum :: postalmuseum.si.edu/mobile
29. Soles4Souls :: m.soles4souls.org
30. Susan G. Komen for the Cure :: m.komen.org
31. Take Me Fishing :: takemefishing.org/mobile
32. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum :: ushmm.mobi
33. World Wildlife Fund :: worldwildlife.org/mobile
Related Links:
Webinar: How Nonprofits Can Successfully Utilize Mobile Websites, Group Texting and Text-to-Give Technology
Webinar: How Nonprofits Can Successfully Utilize Mobile Social Networking Tools and Location-Based Communities
Mobile Technology for Nonprofit Organizations LinkedIn Group
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Nonprofit Tech 2.0 Blog :: A Social Media Guide for Nonprofits 
Thanks for the update on mobile websites, Heather! Do you have any more examples, other than SONC, of regional or local organizations using mobile websites? Thanks again for all your work to support NPOs!
Mike
Nope. These are all I could find. 🙂
Here is a local NPO with a clear, purposeful mobile website. Hope this helps!
m.bowery.org
A new trend in smartphones users is that they just scan a QR code for web address and is handled by their device. Nowadays it is not difficult to get a mobile website. You have a free mobile website account on any online software and get one developed in less than 10 minutes.
I think mobile websites will certainly become a default tool like websites have become.
It will be interesting to see some non profits embrace the format. For example, will a Zoo’s mobile site be interactive and share information related to exhibits while your walking around?
Hopefully as well, a CMS platform,or wizard type tool can lower the barriers to entry for creating a mobile website. I’m under the assumption its more cost effective to collect donations via a website than a text to give campaign with a major carrier.
Mobile websites are often forgotten in the rush to get onto the worldwide web!
Yet how come charities and non-profits realise it and big players don’t?
Really informative post. It’s generally not as hard as most people think, but there are good ways and bad way to accomplish the task.
Thanks for including us on your list! We believe that having the mobile website is critical in reaching out to our consumers: parents! We want them to be able to access our website on their smartphone and quickly get to the information they need!
The Make-A-Wish Foundation hosts a mobile site – m.wish.org.
Such wonderful creativity on those mobile sites – thank you for the links. I checked out each one on my cell to see what they looked like on the actual small screen. Very cool. I wasn’t pleased with the Dallas Museum of Art, though, because they do not let you use the back button to navigate away from their site (the only one of the 33 sites to do this). Not cool, being hijacked by a mobile site, and I hope they correct that.
Would you (or any of your readers) care to recommend a WordPress plugin for a mobile site – or any other mobile site tips and tricks?
I agreed with you. All none profit sites should started to make the mobile edition for easier browsing from mobile or small touch screen.
Janis, you can try “WPTouch”, “WPTab” plug-ins for making automatic mobile site for the mobile users. I’m testing on my personal WP blog, both are works great.
😀
Great Post!
This trend is not only with non profits it is with a lot of industries, for example in the restaurant industry over 82% of restaurant websites dont work at all on mobile phones because they have too much flash or for other reasons.
We have some great plans for non profits and for profit organizations, send us a note is you have any questions.
You can read more about our product at http://www.brickandmobile.com
Most nonprofit website are not ready for the sharing web = social web either. Although some have sharing links, they do not check if their sites support the “Rich Snippets” Facebook, Google+, Storify, scoop and other SNS or curation tools provide. It makes a difference when in a stream with other richly shared posts.
Now, if your nonprofit site needs an overhaul regarding rich snippets and basic SEO best practises, than it might be worth contemplating changing the plattform on which it is built.
We, at the all-volunteer community network, Naples Free-Net have had great success with assisting other nonprofits who moved their sites to self-hosted WordPress instances. A great array of plugins & themes support the social web as well as the Mobile web and can be implemented within a few minutes, provide the accounts at the SNS are already set-up.
Thank you for a great post with this awesome list of Mobile Web sites. It is very helpful!
Тhank you for the post !
http://cifrobyte.com/
Good article and good advice.
UK cancer charity, Macmillan Cancer Support, has a mobile site too m.macmillan.org.uk
At Treasure Coast Hospice in Florida, we just launched a mobile site, possibly the first non-profit hospice to do so. Hospice demographics skew toward the elderly, but we feel smartphones and tablets are exploding so quickly that we needed to jump into it so that we are there when our audience comes looking for us. We’re at m.TCHospice.org.
Great post. Mobile is definitely the way to go these days.