The League Against Cruel Sports has launched a new SMS donation feature within its Facebook fanpage.

It believes that it is the first charity to offer supporters the ability to donate directly through Facebook rather than being directed to another website.

Supporters can choose to donate £1, £3 or £5 by entering their mobile phone number, name and email address on the Facebook page. They are then sent a text message to confirm and the amount is deducted from their telephone bill.

James Dixon, online communications strategist at the League Against Cruel Sports, told civilsociety.co.uk that the League wanted to add donations to their Facebook page, “mainly because Facebook members prefer not to be redirected elsewhere and so we wanted to keep the process within the social network to increase engagement. We basically didn’t want to be shifting people away from Facebook.”

With three times as many Facebook fans as Twitter followers, Dixon added that, “it made sense to start by looking at Facebook rather than Twitter.”

The charity does not have a fixed target for how much it aims to raise through Facebook yet, but will monitor how it works in the next three months and use that to set a target for 2012.
 
Digital agency Chameleon developed the charity’s new Facebook page using iFrames technology. Facebook launched iFrames last February, the technology allows developers to pull HTML content from elsewhere on the web rather than using Facebook’s FBML code to create the page, enabling richer content to be produced more easily.