By using mobile to pose a question to New Yorkers and identify strong leads, nonprofit New York Cares was able to deliver a 2.05 percent click-through rate and help keep people warm during a bitterly cold winter.

Partnering with Qriously, New York Cares was able to deliver an in-application banner with the question, ?Do you have a coat you?d donate to the needy?,? to city residents. Recipients could respond in one of several ways and were sent to a tailored New York Cares homepage based on how they answered.

?Since the coat drive requires a donor to actually drop off a coat at a certain location, reaching potential donors near those locations, while commuting, or even while holiday shopping, gets our message to people who can take action immediately,? said Steve Streicher, director of marketing and communications at New York Cares.

?We saw a lot more activity on the Web site and on social media as a result of our focus on mobile messaging, and that always translates to coats,? he said.

Donating a coat
New York Cares has collection points in all five boroughs for its annual coat drive so that donating a coat is convenient.

However, potential donors need to be aware of where those locations are and how to get there.

Mobile makes sense for this effort because it can help make finding donation points quicker and easier.

Qriously enables brands to display questions that appear in a banner as a way to measure sentiment and deliver a more customized experience for consumers. Ads are also targeted based on location.

For the New York Cares campaign, 51,000 people answered the question posed in a mobile banner about donating a coat with either ?Yes,? ?Tell Me More,? or ?Can donate $.? Qualified consumers were then exposed to more than 1.2 million impressions of answer-specific ads directing to the appropriate New York Cares home page, with 28.7 percent clicking again in order to learn more and/or donate.

Follow the audience
Among those who answered the initial question, 38 percent indicated ?Yes," 31 percent indicated "Tell Me More" and 31 percent indicated they could donate money. The click-through for the first group was 2.14 percent, for the second 2.04 percent and, for the third, 1.96 percent.

The overall click-through rate was 2.05 percent.

The campaign was part of New York Cares annual coat drive, with a post-campaign analysis suggesting that the campaign raised donations.

"New Yorkers, like most Americans, are using mobile devices at least as much, if not more than, other media,? said Joe Zahtila, general manager of North America and executive vice president of commercial at Qriously, London. ?It simply makes sense to follow your audience.

?Additionally, mobile advertising has great advantages over other media as it is far less cluttered and intensely personal,? he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York