First, let me back up a second.

I’ve been getting a lot of calls and emails lately from vendors wanting to make me an app version of my University’s alumni magazine. The magazine apps I’ve seen have been mostly flip-book PDF style apps and they’re expensive to create and maintain.

While driving home in the snow last night, I had a realization. Yesterday, Apple released new software called iBooks Author, free software that will allow people to create multimedia rich books that can be read in the free iBooks app on the iPad.

The light went off. While Apple is aiming this at textbook authors and publishers, there’s no reason we can’t easily create rich multimedia versions of our college magazines using it.

So, last night, I did it. I downloaded iBooks Author and in 15 minutes had a story laid out including photos, an interactive slide show and dynamic image with hot spots and text.

The application is super simple to use, easier than Word, and creating the dynamic elements is very easy. Here’s the interface, I had a few extra guides turned on.

As you work, you can preview your work on an actual iPad, if you have one. You connect it, and a proof shows up in your iBooks 2 app. You can then scroll through the pages in the real app, interact with the elements, highlight, take notes and so on.

This just changed the game.

I made an iBook in half an hour. Imagine if I spent an hour on it.

If I’m not charging for my magazine iBook, and I imagine many institutions wouldn’t, you can distribute the file on your website. If you want to sell it, you’ve got to go through Apple (and they’ll take their 30% cut, thank you very much.)

iBooks Author requires a Mac running OS 10.7.

While meant for K-12 and textbooks, I think they’ve given us higher ed folks a nice present as well.

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It’s definitely easy for someone to just type in five letters to support disaster relief, and this effort has raised millions of dollars for relief efforts, which is good.

But, there’s a bit of a gotcha with fundraising like this.

Often, the actual payout isn’t made to the parties involved, in this case the Red Cross, until several months after the fact. Why the delay? The user has to pay their phone bill. Once that happens, the carrier sends along the cash.

This makes sense if you are signing up for dumb (and sometimes scammy) mobile services like ringtones and horoscopes that add charges to your bill. This is bad if you’re the Red Cross and $10 million that is needed now is sitting in Verizon or AT&T’s coffers.

To be fair, Verizon said they are going to pay out the Red Cross money instead of just waiting as it would with other parties. Good for them. I haven’t been able to find if other carriers will be doing the same. I hope they are.

The buzz over these text donations got me thinking. Would something like this work for higher ed? Would donors to my college be more apt to donate if all they had to do was text “GATORS” to our short code?

I think some would, mostly because it’s super easy. They text a word to a short code, confirm their gift of $25 or some other predetermined value, and they’re done. That’s certainly easier than typing in credit card numbers in a form or finding their checkbook to mail a check. Checks? Quelle horreur!

While it’d be convenient for donors, I think this would completely freak out the people in charge of fundraising.

Why? There’s no paper trail. I don’t know what sort of information the Red Cross is getting from the carriers, but I doubt its much more than a donation amount. For college fundraisers, they want much more. They tend to want names, valid addresses, valid emails, source codes, mailing codes, student id numbers, etc. I don’t blame them, it makes the CRM process much easier in the long run. They want to know what solicitations I’ve responded to, how much I’ve given, if my texting gift is a supplement to my other gifts and so on. It’s all about the data.

Even if a mobile number was passed along as part of a gift, what are the chances that phone number is on record at the institution? I certainly haven’t given my cell number to my alma mater, have you?

I have a few questions. Would you use a system like this to give money? If you’re a fundraising professional, am I off-base in thinking that you wouldn’t like this, or are you more glad to just see some money coming in?