Depaul UK’s iHobo app is still being downloaded 1,500 times a week and is not even available yet on the Android platform.

Tim Harford, head of donor care and community fundraising at the youth homelessness charity, told Fundraising magazine’s Mobile and Digital Conference yesterday that creating the iPhone app was a big risk for Depaul, but one that had paid off massively.

iHobo was the brainchild of Depaul’s long-time pro bono ad agency partner Publicis, which was more used to creating press and poster ads for the charity. After being pitched the idea, Depaul opted to spend its entire £6,000 promotional budget on the app instead of traditional print media, a decision Harford described as “fairly frightening”.

Once it was made, the app was seeded with key bloggers and other opinion-formers.  Its success was instant – iHobo was downloaded more than 100,000 times in the first week, becoming the number one download in Apple’s App Store, and there were 3,000 tweets about it. Overall, media coverage was estimated in the region of £2.4m.

The app generated 4,956 new one-off donors for Depaul, who made an average donation of just over £2 – so total donations have topped £10,000. A telephone campaign to those donors is due to begin shortly to try to convert them to regular donors.

The biggest single donation from an individual donor was £1,000, but Harford added that the charity’s corporate fundraising team had used iHobo to impress corporate partners, and it had “probably driven £100,000 worth of corporate activity”.

Version two of iHobo incorporates a lot of learnings gleaned from the early experience, Harford said. While the inaugural app did not collect users’ email addresses, the updated version does, in return for being given the address of a hostel that the user can then pass on to iHobo.

When users pick up litter around iHobo, they are given facts about homelessness.  And committed users can rack up a score based on how well they look after iHobo, and top scorers will appear on a leaderboard on Facebook.

Harford said the app is still being downloaded around 1,500 times a week and downloads have topped 600,000. “Now we are trying to get into bed with Android developers to deliver iHobo to a whole new audience.”

He admitted that the challenge now for Depaul is to find a way to capitalise on iHobo’s success to boost the profile of the Depaul brand.  “At the moment iHobo is pulling Depaul UK along and in a perfect world it would be the other way round.”