Mobile phones have enormous potential in electoral, voter registration, and election monitoring campaigns.
With close to 2.5 billion phones in circulation around the world, in many countries mobile phones are the easiest and least expensive way to communicate and are far more pervasive than the Internet.
Internationally mobile phones have been used for systematic election monitoring in Macedonia and Kenya, among women voters in Saudi Arabia, and in a number of popular uprisings in the Ukraine and South Korea. In the 2004 U.S. election, almost 10,000 people started their voter registration process through a mobile campaign. This year the U.S. based group Mobile Voter aims to register 55,000 young people to vote via their cell phones.
While the use of mobile phones in elections and voter registration campaigns is still in an experimental stage, a lot has been learned about the characteristics of successful campaigns. In this guide we will share these findings with you, along with case studies, and other information organizations can use to run their own mobile campaigns.
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This guide was written by Michael Stein, a writer and Internet strategist, and edited by Katrin Verclas, the executive director of
NTEN.Read the press release.
MobileActive is a project of Green Media Toolshed. The MobileActive Strategy Guides were produced with the support of the Surdna Foundation, and in collaboreation with NTEN: Your Nonprofit Technology Community.
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In very exciting news, microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunas and the Grameen Bank he founded have won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for their work bringing people out of poverty in Bangladesh. This is a great win for everyone who believes that the path to peace is through ending poverty and that technology can help achieve this.
Yunas came up with the concept of microfinance, which has made it possible for millions of Bangladeshis to rise out of poverty. He has also made great strides in bringing technology to poor areas in Bangladesh, particularly cell phones.
The Grameen Phone initiative uses cell phones for economic development. How it works is that banks give loans so people can purchase mobile phones and in turn rent them out to others in their villages. These phones are often the first access entire villages have to a telephone. Not only do these phones make excellent businesses for the people who manage them, but they also make it possible for everyone in the town to work more efficiently through faster communications. A case study about this program is available here. I’ve also written about it here.
And not surprisingly, access to mobile technology is bringing about the development of innovative new tools to meet Bangladeshi’s specific needs. One example is the service Cell Bazaar, a kind of mobile Craig’s List that people can use to check prices before they buy or sell a product to make sure they are getting the best rate.
Congratulations Yunas and Grameen Bank. Your win is a great achievement for the movement behind using technology for social change, the field of microfinance, and everyone in Bangladesh.
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Recently YouthNoise and Virgin Mobile launched a mobile campaign designed to raise awareness of teen homelessness in other teens in the United States. The campaign – called Ghost Town – takes a unique twist on more typical SMS campaigns. It gets its message out through an SMS story sent in regular installments over a month.
Teens can subscribe to the story by texting GHOST to the short code 1234. After that they’ll receive a chapter of the story in a 160 character text message twice a day for a month. Sounds like a mobile soap opera, doesn’t it?
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The UN World Food Programme recently received a different kind of text message – a direct plea for help from a refugee in northern Kenya. The message said, “My name is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilogrammes of food. You must help.”
In an article from the UN Refugee Agency about the SMS, reporter Greg Barrow asks what the impact would be if in addition to giving refugees food, the World Food Programme also gave them a few mobile phones and the numbers of all star donors like Bono and Bill Gates. Mohammed’s text message has been making the rounds in the international press so I don’t doubt that similar messages could draw further attention to problems in refugee camps. But I think a greater impact could be made if an organization, like the One Campaign for example, sought out SMS messages like Mohammed’s from people in refugee camps in need of urgent help and sent them to their network. I bet many people who receive such a personal message will want to help, and if they can help by making a small donation from their mobile phone or sending the sms message on to their political representatives, it could spur action to help alleviate problems such as Mohammed’s.
You can read the entire UNHCR article here.
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In the latest edition in m-trends’ series on women in mobile, Rudy de Waele features Trixie Concepcion from TXT Power and Mobile Active. Trixie played a key role in spreading the infamous Hello Garci ringtone throughout the Philippines and helped make it the most well known political ringtone in the world. It's a great interview that you can't miss. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
While some of us are working and wondering what’s going to be the next new business model or next killer application in mobile technology, other people in different parts of the world are using the mobile phone to fight injustice. Trixie Concepcion of TXTPower, the group that popularized the Hello Garci protest ringtones in the Fillipines, is one of them. I think it’s essential for m-trends.org readers to know a bit more about her and her activities.
You can read the whole piece over at
m-trends.
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Earlier this month the Boston Police Department started sending out text messages and emails to tell residents about crimes happening in their neighborhoods. The goal isn’t to instill fear in residents; it’s to get them involved in solving crimes. Police think that this system will make it easier for people to send in leads on cases since they can do so quickly and electronically, and that it will put more people on the lookout for suspects when they’re most vulnerable – soon after they commit crimes. The alerts also keep people better informed on the specific crimes happening in their neighborhoods, enabling them to better protect themselves. Most people are more inclined to lock their car doors if they know that two cars have been stolen within a few minutes of where they park.
Crime alert systems that use SMS and email messages are becoming more common. Citizen Observer, the company that runs Boston’s system, works with police departments in more than 300 U.S. and Canadian towns and cities. Singapore police have been sending out SMS alerts on local crimes for more than a year, and subscribers receive SMS messages like the following that tell them about local crimes and what they can do to help:
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It’s widely accepted that social networks are the latest online wonder child. MySpace.com is the fifth most popular website in the world, YouTube.com is the 20th, and Xanga.com is the 38th, according to Alexa.com traffic ratings. But will these communities work away from the computer?
MySpace thinks so. In April the website made a deal with Cingular to offer text message alerts to people whenever a new comment is added to their MySpace page. And Helio, a start up mobile company, has released a phone chock full of MySpace features that allow mobile users to view MySpace profiles and easily post comments and photos to the website from their phone. If this catches on, it could pave the way and even serve as a model for comprehensive mobile and web campaigns. Cell phones are already being effectively used around the world to contact government officials, register voters, and sway voters. Combining the text, photo, video, and voice capabilities of cell phones with a strong online community could make for very powerful, community-focused campaigns.
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Cell phones have added $650 million to Bangladesh’s gross domestic product (GDP) and created almost 240,000 jobs in the country. On top of that, most of the jobs pay significantly more than the average job, a recent study by the international firm Ovum found. Grameen Phone, and its Village Phone program, should be given a lot of credit for this.
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With the expansion of cell phone access and text messaging use, it was only a matter of time before it started – the SMS joke. And not surprisingly, few subjects are poked fun at more than local politics and of course the politicians.
"Da Vinci Code to be totally banned in the Philippines. GMA [Gloria Macapagal Arroyo] has been informed by Dan Brown that she is a direct descendant of Judas."
That’s one of the many SMS jokes being circulated throughout the Philippines making fun of the current president and her restrictive policies, among other things. Tonyo Cruz from TXTPower, and a MobileActive, passed on a bunch of the jokes that he’s seen sent around the country. You can read them all at the bottom of this post – thanks Tonyo!
The Philippines has been ahead of the curve in using cell phones for activism (remember the 2001 revolution and the Hello Garci ring tones), but SMS political jokes are spreading to other countries too. In Tamil Nadu, India, residents are sending out SMS jokes to make fun of the candidates from a recent election and their policies. One message circulating the region is an image of a candidate crying – supposedly showing her dismay at her party’s poor performance in the election. Another criticizes one party’s idea to give out “freebies,” saying that these practices will hurt businesses and make people lazy.
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