We are occasionally commissioned to write introductory articles about the mobile revolution and implications for NGOs for various publications. Here is one broad overview of some areas where mobiles are deployed in civil society.
Cellphones have become the most ubiquitous communication device in the hands of human beings. There are an estimated 3.5 billion mobile phones in use and there is coverage in even remote corners of the world. Cellphones have revolutionized not just the way we work and organize within cultures and societies, but have the potential to change how NGOs (non-governmental organizatios) operate.
Mobile phones are already experimentally used in multiple ways by NGOs. We at MobileActive.org have been tracking how organizations in areas such as health and disease prevention, economic development, humanitarian relief, democratic participation, and advocacy are using mobile phones to make their work more effective and efficient.
Following are a few examples of what we have seen and where we think mobile phones have potential to be used more strategically by NGOs.
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.
Hyves, the 5-million-peope strong Dutch social network, has a clever HIV/AIDS awareness campaign, combining social network and viral marketing with mobile fundraising.
Use your Hyve to save a Life is a campaign from STOP AIDS NOW!. If you are in the Netherlands, you can send a text message to donate 1 Euro to the campaign.
"Please Call Me" messages are a popular cultural form of mobile communication in South African society. These USSD messages are used to advertise everything from car insurance to domestic airlines to the local corner store. Today, thanks to a recent project by SocialTxt, these free messages are used for the first time ever for social marketing: to encourage South Africans to get tested for HIV and obtain AIDS information.
A mobile phone service launched in South Africa this past Saturday provides HIV testing station locations through the use of SMS. South Africans can send an SMS to the short code "31771" with the word "HIV" followed by the name of their town or postal code. The service then responds with the location of the two nearest traveling testing units.
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.
Mobile phones are creating connections between people living with HIV/AIDS in Mexico. A recently completed pilot project called Zumbido allowed its 40 test users of diverse backgrounds to communicate about the daily challenges they face in a meaningful and lasting support network. Unlike other hotline or support mobile phone services, where a user calls one person for help, Zumbido functioned as a network, with each text message sent to every member of the support group.
Mobileactive had a conversation with Anna Kydd, one of the project coordinators of Zumbido. Zumbido -- "buzz" in Spanish -- provided its 40 participants with mobile phones and unlimited text messages. The large group was broken up into four smaller groups of 10. Each group had a mix of different types of people from urban and rural locations, all from the Mexican state of Jalisco. Each group also included a professional doctor or psychologist. "The role of the professional was not to be a sort of leader in the group, however," said Anna. "Everyone in the group was an expert in their own experiences, and they all had something to give that group."
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.
A new mobile application, mobGAS, can be used to track individual emissions of greenhouse gases. The application, developed by scientists in the European Union, tracks the emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane based on information on daily activities entered by the user. Users can enter the information on a website and then compare their emissions with national and international averages.
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.
Several civil society groups in Africa are using SMS messages as part of the global "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence." The campaign, hosted by the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGET) in collaboration with Women'sNet and APC-Africa Women (AAW), has the theme "Demanding Implementation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence Against Women." The groups will send an SMS on each of the 16 days of the campaign with a message relating to gender-based violence.
The campaign website lists three ways to partipate:
Mainstream press in the United States is picking up on the mobile revolution. In an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Fish Phone, Sex Info, our friends in San Francisco, and medicine compliance programs are profiled:
In England, women have received text reminders to take their birth-control pills. In Australia, texting helped AIDS patients adhere to complicated drug regimens. And German researchers are examining how text messages can offer psychological support to bulimics. A recent study in New Zealand found that smoking-cessation programs were more effective in conjunction with supportive text messages.
Text reminders and health and consumer info lines are exploding in popularity, paving the way for innovative prorams in other areas as well that pertain to point-of-purchase consumer information, and using textig for civic and advocacy information that we are, of course, particularly interested in.
A new software project called Loadstone-GPS provides navigational assistance to blind and visually impaired individuals. The software, which is open source and can be downloaded for free, uses screen readers such as Mobile Speak and Talks and can be operated on a Nokia phone with the S60 smartphone platform.
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.
We reported a few days ago on the use of a text-to-screen campaign by the advocacy coalition It's OUR Healthcare! (IOH) in California. Now that the campaign is over, we've interviewed the organizers for more details on this innovative use of SMS in political advocacy.
Matt Lockshin, the online organizer for the It's OUR Healthcare! campaign sat down with us for a conversation. Lockshin told us that although the campaign dealt with some technical challenges, he was pleased with the quantity of SMS messages received and the response from media, political advocacy groups, and people in California.
Imagine buying drugs to cure malaria, only to find that the ineffective medicine contains a mixture of chalk and starch. Or imagine taking counterfeit birth control and finding yourself pregnant, or getting inoculated for meningitis -- as was the case with 2,500 people in Niger -- and finding that the vaccine was deadly.
California Activist Coalition It's OUR Healthcare has launched a new SMS campaign broadcasting text messages on a screen in Sacramento. The campaign is in response to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest health care proposal, which IOH says disregards issues of affordability, deductibles and coverage. The legislature is holding its first hearing on the issue today.
I had the great pleasure to meet Krista Dong and Zinhle Thabethe from iTeach who are at the frontlines of treating and preventing AIDS in South Africa, the epicenter of this global crisis. These amazing, committed and inspired women talk about their daily experience working with people with HIV and AIDS in Kawazulu Natal and how they think mobile phones could exponentially scale their work. As Krista says, "To deal with the scope of this problem, to even begin to make a dent, we need new ideas, crazy ideas. And everyone, everyone has a cell phone." Watch if you want to hear from frontline workers how mobile phones can revolutionize their social change work.
HIV/AIDS is one of the most significant human, health, and development issues facing Africa today. NGOs and health care providers are increasingly turning to mobile phones to address the unique challenges of AIDS awareness, prevention and treatment. "HIV/AIDS is arguably the most pressing development problem facing South Africa – and Africa," asserts a report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF ) and Women'sNet, a South African network of people who use ICTs in gender-related advocacy and support. The report, titled "Rapid Assessment of Cell Phones for Development," is available here on the UNICEF website.
