Mobile payments as a revenue source for charitable organizations goes back to Back to the Future 2, where a random volunteer—reportedly named “Terry”—pressed Marty to “thumb a hundred bucks to help save the clock tower.”
Recently, the charitable organization Water is Life put a similar practice to work, taking advantage of a loophole in Venmo’s systems to mean big returns.
Venmo doesn’t let users actually post advertising on the app, not even not-for-profit charitable brands.
This is likely designed as a way to keep users from freaking out when seeing a slew of advertisers in the same page as a set of credit card statements.
So when Water is Life joined up with agency Deutsch New York to get out the word and encourage donations, it wanted to hit Venmo, but it couldn’t actually advertise on Venmo itself.
Or could it?
Deutsch hit on a clever notion, watching Venmo’s global news feed. When Deutsch saw there was a lot of traffic on the Fourth of July—a time when Water for Life’s target market, millennials, were heavily engaged in using Venmo to pay each other for food and drink—Deutsch swept in with a surprise move.
What Deutsch did was it sent out one-cent payments on Venmo, using the 2,000 character message field that comes with Venmo’s system, to give users a message related to the payments just made.
One customer might hear “1 cent can’t pay someone back for a beer, but it can help buy someone clean water for a day.” The message concluded with a way to donate to Water is Life.
It’s likely to draw imitators, being too easy to not actively use. If it’s done right, it not only catches users’ attention—no one doesn’t pay attention when getting free money out of nowhere—it also makes it easy to appropriately reciprocate and potentially even donate more cash than is strictly called for.
A peer-to-peer focused mobile payment system like Venmo is uniquely suited for such a capability, and there’s not even much incentive for Venmo to step in and stop this.
It’s a clever idea, and a loophole that may not be in play for long, but for the time being, mobile payments users may be getting a whole lot more advertising—complete with token cash payments—if this penny-spam project takes off.