There’s a revolution coming in nonprofit marketing, and it’s closer than you think. To find it, just pull out your cell phone and turn it on. You are holding the future of marketing in your hand.

The mobile device may seem humble to you. After all, the cell phone has been around for decades. Today’s smartphones are a far cry from the mobile phones that used to be the size of a football. The iPhone, the Blackberry and the rest are not only faster, they’re smarter. But perhaps their greatest asset is as a communications platform — they integrate and empower a host of other technologies that make them more than the sum of their parts. Web, search, email, social media, photography, video, games, maps and more are now all part of the smartphone. Quite literally, the mobile device will not be just another communications device. Very soon, it will be the communications device. Everything you want to say to your stakeholders and donors will very soon flow through this one device. That changes everything.

The change is already happening. Three-quarters of Canadians now own a cell phone and in some urban areas cell phone penetration is more than 90%. The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) says in the first three months of 2010, consumers sent just over 12.1 billion person-to-person text messages, which translates into roughly 135 million texts a day. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, texting is one of the fastest growing methods of communicating. Adults who text typically send and receive an average of 10 texts a day, but only make or receive five voice calls a day.

Many nonprofits have jumped in with both feet. The Mobile Giving Foundation Canada, a pioneer in mobile giving, announced in February that donations made via mobile phones for Haiti Earthquake Relief in Canada have surpassed $500,000 across all the short codes managed by the organization. According to the CWTA, the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation received 1,400 text donations of $5.00 each in a one-day promotion.

Nonprofits in the US have led the way in mobile marketing. And that should be no surprise because the mobile market south of the border is so much larger. According to a white paper by Smaato, a US mobile marketing consultancy, the mobile internet community in the US is now estimated to be 100 million people. Presently, the US is the second largest mobile advertising market in the world, behind Japan. In 2010, the US mobile advertising market will be worth $797 million. In 2015, it is estimated that it will grow to $5.04 billion.

However, at present mobile represents just one percent of total advertising spending in the US. To many, it is a sign that while mobile marketing has great promise, it is still immature, both as a market and as a technology. The Canadian Smartphone Monitor reported in September 2009 that half of the cell phone users they polled had owned a smartphone for less than one year.

There are many challenges with mobile marketing. One is the technology itself. There are limits, both technical and customer preference-wise, that shape the message marketers can use. Text messaging, for example, has the look and feel of Twitter, with limited text and, of course, no images. For nonprofits used to sending large amounts and text and graphics, this is a challenge. There are ways to send multimedia, but not all phones accept them and there are limits to what customers will allow their phones to load before they lose interest.

Another barrier is cost. New players and software are making mobile marketing easier to create and send each day, but most advertisers today need a specialized agency to help them deliver a mobile marketing solution. SMS (of texting) is cheap and efficient. Building your own iPhone app is not. Smaato says the average mobile advertising campaign in the US costs between $75,000-$100,000. On average, agencies receive roughly 10-15% of the budget. In the UK, the agencies make less, usually about seven percent.

Coupled with cost is price. Many mobile marketing campaigns are limited to donations of $5.00 or $10.00. This makes the value of a mobile marketing campaign less than web or email. Certainly, for major gift-oriented charities, mobile marketing is not a replacement for face-to-face fundraising. The limit will likely change as the technology improves.

A final consideration must be the legislative framework around mobile devices that separates them from the web and email. Now and going forward, marketing to mobile customers requires very clear opt-ins. Your donors and stakeholders will have to want to receive your message. Like email before it, currently there are a significant number of users who consider any ad or marketing message on their cell phone to be an intrusion. Hopefully, this will change in time, but for now, many customers are reluctant to give out their cell phone numbers to an organization that wants to send them an advertisement or promotion.

Experts, like Tiffany Chester of Tagga Media, a Vancouver mobile marketing agency, say the place to start is in converting your existing web offerings so that they work on smart phones. This can be tricky, especially for older web designs. It means, for example, no Flash or complicated graphics. In some cases, marketers build custom websites for their mobile users.

The true promise of mobile devices has yet to arrive. In many ways, it is what smart phones will do in the future rather than the present that is the most important thing to remember. One of them is “geo-marketing” — the ability to market to customers in a certain geographical location. This can already be done, but in the future it will be even more sophisticated and powerful. It means that where a customer is will be more important than who they are. Problems that plague mobile devices today, such as bandwidth, will fall away as networks and devices improve. One day soon, streaming video on a mobile device will be as common as it is on a desktop computer today.

The real question nonprofits have to ask themselves is whether they are ready for the change. Mobile marketing requires a different set of skills, and more important, a new way of thinking. Nonprofit marketing has been consistently underfunded for years in Canada, and the current economic downturn has not helped. Most marketing and communications departments are short-staffed and lack skills and experience. To them, dealing with this revolution in marketing may be the last thing they need.

To begin, sit down with your staff. Pull out your cell phone and make them pull out theirs. Then ask what your nonprofit will be like in 10 years when all marketing and communications will flow through the device in your hands. That should get the discussion going.

John Suart is a marketing and communications expert with an MBA who specializes in nonprofits. His blog, the Nonprofit Marketer, has a host of useful tips and advice on everything from budgeting to branding.