Limbo, a mobile marketing company, provided three of the U.S. presidential candidates with free mobile advertising. The goal was to measure how voting intentions and perceptions change with SMS advertising.
The results were surprising, Limbo's Chief Marketing Officer Rob Lawson told MobileActive. SMS advertising changed the "voting intentions" of 28% of the people who received the messages and about 14% of recipients said they viewed the candidates more positively after the campaign. "I was surprised by the impact on voting intention," said Lawson. "I thought people would be comfortable receiving them, but I didn't think it would cause them to pay more attention to the candidates."
This February 5th isn't just any Tuesday in the United States. It's Super Tuesday, so named because 23 of the 50 states are holding presidential primaries, making it the contest that could potentially determine the all-important presidential Democratic and Republican nominees.
Television station MTV (Music Video Television) has an innovative new effort to get out the youth vote and merge citizen journalism with mainstream media. The effort, dubbed "Street Team '08," is made possible through mobile phones.
MobileActives are increasingly making the news as mainstream press is picking up the potential of mobiles as organizing, advocacy, and mobilization tools in social change movements. In an article in the Financial Times today, the focus is on young social change leaders using technology, and increasingly, cell phones in their work. Profiling Maft and its (former) leader Erion Veliaj of Mjaft, an Albanian young people's political movement, it's clear that good organizing and social change is unthinkable today without mobile phones.
Have you heard the joke about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? If you're a young person in Iran you probably have. Political jokes are spreading like wildfire in Iran, reports Parisa Dezfoulian in an article on texting in Iran in Middle East Online.
According to Desfoulian, SMS has become a way for young people to circumvent authority, largely through the spread of political jokes on subjects from nuclear energy to petrol bans to government rationing. She notes that with more than 20 million SMS messages sent every day in Iran,
Political ringtones, wallpapers, and SMS election updates are part and parcel of election campaigns in countries around the world -- from Spain to Kenya to the Phillipines, from Argentina to the Ukraine. It is has taken until this year's presidential election, however, for political contenders the United States to catch up.
We are very pleased to announce the first set of translations of MobileActive's Strategy Guides into Arabic. Thank you to the National Democratic Institute for its pro-bono support for the translation.
Mobile phones have become a powerful emerging tool for participation in civil society. The MobileActive series of Strategy Guides, now in Arabic, examines the effectiveness of civil society organizations using mobile phones to build their constituent lists, influence political causes, and raise money. In the Guides we aggregate strategies, case studies, and lessons learned to encourage the adoption of mobile phones by nonprofits.
This series of Strategy Guides is designed to equip organizations around the world with the know-how to deploy effective mobile campaigns for a variety of types of activism and advocacy.
To ring in the New Year, MobileActive is conducting, with the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Group Foundation, a global survey of more than 25,000 civil society groups about how these organisations are using mobile phones in their work.
When most mainstream media report on Kenya's upcoming elections, they focus on the perspectives of people in cities or urban areas. However, since this October citizen journalists using cell phones have reported on news and political perspectives from rural Kenyan communities. A new collaboration between Media Focus on Africa and the Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN) gives mobile phones to "Community Information Volunteers" to use as a reporting tool.
I attend an increasing number of keynotes where CEOs and EVPs of both major mobile handset manufacturers and mobile operators trumpet their role in bringing the internet to the bottom of the pyramid in the developing world. It's a total fallacy.
Did you know that you can dial up the Burmese government for free from your mobile phone? A new program called Call for Change allows users to call Burma and other humanitarian causes at no cost beyond what their mobile provider charges for a local call.
Call for Change is a program of Rebtel, a Stockholm-based company that provides low-cost and free ways to make calls on a mobile phone. The service works currently works in 40 countries and 50 U.S. cities.
Call for Change started about a month ago during the protests in Burma. Rebtel's staffers felt passionately about the Burmese protests, and were frustrated when Burma suddently disappeared from the nightly news. Greg Spector, one of Rebtel's founders, wrote on Rebtel's blog:
Remember the 'coup de text' in the Phillipines in 2001? How about the text message joke circulating right before Poland's elections last month that read "Steal your grandmother's ID"?
Anyone following protest movements in the last few years has witnessed how mobile phones have become an integral part of the mass organizing of protests and demonstration. In the Philippines, South Korea, Nepal, Bolivia, China, the Ukraine, the United States, and most recently Burma and Pakistan, cell phone have connected activists and ordinary people, giving civic voice to individuals and creating communication channels for organizing, mobilizing, and reporting.
In this MobileActive.org White Paper on Mobile Phones in Mass Organizing, we describe the tactical uses of mobiles in organizing, security for activists and NGOs, and address some of the realities and myths that have surrounded the rise of the mobile phone as a tool in mass organizing.
MobileActive's last event in Brazil is over but the coverage continues: Evgeny Morozov writes in the current issue of the Economist about the pioneers of using mobile phones in advocacy and civil society.
He writes: "At a recent conference in São Paulo on “mobile activism”—a term that embraces humanitarian work as well as protest—there was much talk about how to “go beyond text” when using mobile phones. And it became clear that exuberant practice was galloping ahead of theory.
He notes rightly what MobileActives already know: "Mobile activists have never lacked imagination, and many of them are already hard at work, thinking of clever new uses for those little devices—mostly rather crude, five-year-old models—that have become part of daily life in the poorest parts of the world." Read the article.
QR codes have been in the news recently, bringing news stories, animated zoo animals, and nurtrition facts from tiny barcodes to the screens of mobile phones worldwide. By linking print media with mobile phones, the codes are helping to bridge the connection between old and new media and have impliations for social mobile campaigns.
A QR -- or Quick Response -- code is a two dimensional bar code that can be used for tracking or link to information such as a website or text message. When a user scans the code with a camera phone the code then links to the destination URL or other information. The codes were first created by a Japanese corporation in 1994 for tracking parts used in car manufacturing, but today are found in everything from newspapers to business cards to advertisements. QR codes can hold several hundred times more information than conventional bar codes.
The numbers speak for themselves: There are currently 236 million cell phone users in the U.S. – an astounding 76% penetration. In December of last year alone, 18.7 billion text messages were sent — up 92% from 9.7 billion in December 2005. Estimates for this year are topping 195 billion text messages sent in 2007. That is 600 million text messages a day.
Needless to say, fundraisers and nonprofits are salivating at the potential of reaching all of these people where they are, at the moment they are moved by a cause, and when they are able to GIVE – with their thumbs.
Mobile fundraising for worthwhile causes are indeed beginning to make headlines. So what is the truth behind the hype? What can fundraisers and nonprofits promoting a cause do and expect as results, and what creative ideas have gone untapped so far?
Nonprofits from Around the World Gather for MobileActive07 at Mobilefest on Use of Mobile Phones in Economic Empowerment and Civic Participation
Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 23, 2007 – Ring, ring …Social Change is Calling: MobileActive is convening technologists and activists using mobile phones and text messaging for economic empowerment, advocacy, environmental and democracy campaigns from around the world.
MobileActive07 will take place in conjunction with Mobilefest in Sao Paulo, Brazil November 24 and 25th, 2007. “Mobile phones have become innovative tools for social innovation,” said Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive. “With close to 3 billion phones in circulation around the work, in many countries mobile phones are the easiest and least expensive way to communicate and are far more pervasive than the Internet. As a result, mobile phones have been harnessed by individuals and organizations to monitor elections, protect the environment, for citizen journalism, for urgent alerts, and for economic empowerment and advocacy campaigns all over the world.
Bloggers, activists and organizers in Pakistan are using SMS - short test messages - to coordinate protests and send updates on the political situation since Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf imposed martial law on November 3. Only 12% of Pakistanis have access to the internet and therefore mobile phones are a particularly useful communication tool in the current media blackout, imposed since emergency rule was imposed. Bloggers in Pakistan report that November 3 had the "highest number" of SMS messages sent -- an average of about 10 per mobile phone.
Google announced today Android and of the Open Handset Alliance, throwing wide open the field of mobile applications for commercial and social and civic causes and potentially much cheaper handsets that are especially important in developing countries. We here at MobileActive.org think that this will spur developments for the social sector that are faster and cheaper -- an "Android for Good."
The Open Handset Alliance is a consortium of more than 30 tech and mobile companies and Android is its open platform. Google's support of the project and development of the new mobile app software stack that includes an operating system, moddleware and open applications development is significant and seen as a major competitor to other mobile platform providers such as Microsoft, RIM, and Symbian.
The government of Togo has banned the use of SMS by the Rally of the Togolese People (RPT), the Togolese ruling political party, reports Highway Africa News Agency. The High Authority for Audiovisual Communications (HAAC), a press regulation body, has prohibited the messages because voters viewed the SMS as intimidation, calling them "unfair propaganda" and an "illicit practice."
According to the News Agency, voters had complained about unsolicited SMS messages received from the RPT in view of the upcoming legislative election on this Sunday, October 14. Supposedly, part of the message read, "To maintain the current dynamics of reconciliation and economic growth and social stability, vote RPT." The HAAC "has asked the country's political parties to follow the law or face the wrath of the law."
Hoy introduce MobileActive un recurso nuevo para los activistas movilistas. Esta guía de estrategia en español tiene información detallada sobre el uso de los teléfonos celulares en América Latina y estudios sobre los celulares usados por el activismo social en varios países latinoamericanos.
Today MobileActive introduces a new resource for mobile activists. Our first Spanish-language Strategy Guide provides detailed information about the use of mobile phones in Latin America and case studies of mobiles used for social activism in different Latin American countries.
