Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

by Jen Gilomen, Lead Developer, Strategic Initiatives at BAVC

At the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans this year, the rooms were all a-buzz with mobile — and it wasn’t just the 1,000+ attendees’ phones on vibrate. In 2007, we saw an explosion of nonprofits and activists beginning to use mobile to, well, mobilize their constituencies. With the ONE campaign, U2 collected the names of over 280,000 concert-goers for a petition to end hunger in Africa. When Verizon blocked the messages of abortion rights group NARAL (against, of all things, its own economic interests), the act of censorship became symbolic of net neutrality and corporate America’s political influence over consumer communications, and after Verizon received over 20,000 messages from their appalled customers, they backed down. Larger nonprofits have used mobile campaigns to remind young people to vote, to disseminate information, and to gather txt-signatures for petitions. But as we look toward BAVC’s upcoming Nonprofit Producers Institute (the first of its kind), how can smaller or more localized nonprofits participate in the mobile revolution?

Ben Rigby of Mobile Voter and Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org provided some great information at the conference. Here are a few takeaways:

D.I.Y. It

There are two ways to run a mobile campaign: do it yourself, or hire a company to do it for you. There are many advantages to using a service, including reporting, reliability, and above all, their expertise. (If you are running a suicide prevention program, or other critical service, for example, you wouldn’t rely on the D.I.Y. approach.) But if you’re just getting your feet wet or doing something on a small scale, a mobile campaign can cost no more than one dedicated cell phone (with unlimited or large capacity txt service) connected to a computer. Using a free, open source application called FrontlineSMS (now only for P.C., but soon for Mac and Linux), you can set up a basic text campaign, track all of your mobile contacts, disseminate and receive information, conduct text-based surveys, and run text campaigns at events from a laptop with no Internet connection, anywhere that has cell reception. Which brings me to the next point:

Location, location, location

If any point was driven home by the mobile practitioners at the NTC, it was about context. The user must receive a text when and where they’re ready to act upon it. Several companies are working on applications that use GIS to text people when they’re near a service location or store. If you’re collecting constituent mobile numbers for the first time, for example, do so at an event, and tie it to a prize or piece of information that they’ll receive immediately. The future of shopping could be that when you see something you want, you send a text, and are billed through your phone company and automatically delivered the item by mail. This can also be the future of donations — asking people to act at the moment of inspiration. Will your constituents feel motivated to act when they pass a billboard? What about if they’re asked to pull out their phones and text during an event?

Trust me not 2 txt u @ 2am

The Mobile Marketing Association recently released a set of Mobile Advertising Guidelines for marketing on mobile devices. You must allow users to opt-in in order to receive texts, and you should also offer them a way to opt-out later.

Mobile penetration still outweighs Internet penetration amongst not only global audiences, but here in the U.S. And while many of us still can’t stand reading much but text messages and headlines on our phones, and dread the mass-marketing that will no doubt invade our personal communication spaces in the next year, these always-with-us, always-on contraptions are here to stay, and it’s time for nonprofits to take baby steps toward embracing mobile.

Resources

Mobile how-to for nonprofits:

Ben Rigby’s new book:
Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth

Katrin Verclas’ April 24, 2008 blog post about why advocacy groups should embrace SMS, and practical how-tos:
Using Mobiles for your Cause: Do’s and Don’ts of mAdvocacy

Companies that provide campaign-type services for nonprofits:

MobileActive’s list of U.S. mobile companies
Mobile Accord
Mobile Cause
Mobile Commons

What BAVC’s Next Generation Programs is using for mobile social marketing and artist self promotion:

Kadoink

More on the NARAL Short Code Controversy and mobile neutrality:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/us/27verizon.html?hp
http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/9/28/3258382.html