With mobile?s importance continuing to grow for nonprofits, executives from organizations that are leading the way, including UNICEF, The Nature Conservancy and Goodwill, will convene at the fifth annual Nonprofit Mobile Day to discuss how they are leveraging mobile to drive marketing and fundraising efforts.

In addition to learning about how individual charities use mobile, the full-day event will provide attendees with best-practices for important mobile tactics such as SMS, mobile Web and applications as well as key insights into emerging trends such as responsive design. The event is a presentation of Napean?s Mobile Commerce Daily and the DMA Nonprofit Federation.

Mobile support
Nonprofit Mobile Day will take place on July 15 at the Direct Marketing Association Seminar Center located at 1120 Avenue of the Americas on the 13th floor.

Executives from the following companies will present at the event: Citymeals-on-Wheels, Donate-A-Photo by Johnson & Johnson, Goodwill, Mobile Giving Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Text-to-Pledge, Thirteen/WNET and UNICEF.

Please click here to learn more about the event.

Below, several speakers weigh in on why mobile is critical for nonprofits and what attendees can expect at the event.

Rajesh Anandan, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and UNICEF Ventures for the U.S. Fund at UNICEF.
Mobile is critical for everyone ? non-profits, for profits, governments, citizens. Given the already high penetration of smartphones in industrialized countries and feature phones in developing countries, mobile allows any organization to reach clients, employees or supporters at all times. From real-time tracking of services to personalized delivery of content, mobile carries tremendous potential for non-profits, big or small, to drive impact, engagement and revenue.

Attendees can expect to learn about what technologies can be leveraged in reaching low-bandwidth, off-grid communities, how mobile opens up the potential for new business models and revenue streams and why organizations need to look beyond mobile and design-for-everything.

Geof Rochester, chief marketing officer at The Nature Conservancy
Clearly in the past five years mobile has become essential across every sector, business and non-profit for promotion, content distribution and increasingly for transactions. In the NGO sector, it?s a particularly relevant channel because of the limited budgets we have.

As a means of getting the word out, mobile is an important low cost extension of our marketing. Also, as mobile continues its link to social media, it can be an important tool to enable grassroots campaigns around fast breaking issues like the Nigerian kidnappings who?s messaging was built around the hashtag ?bring back our girls.?

Further, as we all know, mobile is a transformational platform. Developing countries in particularly are jumping the typical communications hierarchy, which means that consumers are having unprecedented access to brands at enormous scale. If you are trying to educate and inspire around critical issues like the environment, aids, malaria, education, you now have a massive platform with which to do this.

We are all trying to get our arms around mobile. It?s big, it?s sexy, but it?s also very much unknown. What is the appropriate investment? What?s the ?meat? vs. ?the hype??

At the conference attendees can expect an honest, direct and humble discussion of what?s working and what?s not?.and most importantly what we don?t know. For our part, at the Nature Conservancy we feel that as the leading non-profit operating in the environmental sector we have to get mobile right. It needs to be incorporated into everything we do. The approach needs to be global, yet locally authentic.

Mobile also needs to be incorporated into all aspects of the business. It can?t be viewed as a narrow channel strategy. At TNC we want all 3,700 employees, especially our 500 scientists thinking of mobile in the context of our content and promotion strategy.

And very important ? we can?t do it all ourselves. Partnerships will be a critical part of our marketing strategy and by extension our mobile strategy. To that end I will specifically be talking about a mobile platform called WeChat and our partnership with one of the largest companies in the space, Tencent. If your audience does not know about them, they really need to. They have 400M users in China and 500M globally.

Jim Manis, founder/CEO of BBB Mobile Giving Foundation
Mobile, reflected both in the nature of the technology and its ubiquitous use by virtually every adult in our society, is a regulated channel with tremendous impact on economic and organizational efficiencies. Mobile gives us an addressable audience of over 335,000,000 whose users now prefer their wireless devices when accessing websites, consuming information and entertainment, and transacting business.

It is important that the nonprofit sector has a strong voice as a stakeholder in determining how mobile develops to best meet its needs of mission awareness, donor acquisition, engagement, and payments, and in effectively using mobile in its marketing and service delivery.

Attendees can expect the latest examples of best use case scenarios, discussion of issues impacting use of mobile technology for viral fundraising and a lively Q&A on the evolution of mobile marketing for charities.

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