A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
Note: This primer was written for the NTEN newsletter, targeted at a US audience and thus focuses on America. For more on mobile advocacy in many other parts of the world, see here.
Mobile phones are more prevalent in the U.S. than ever before. Today, over 86% of the US population ages 13 and up owns a mobile phone. Although Americans say that the mobile phone is the device that they hate the most (it even beats the alarm clock and the television!), the cell phone is here to stay. In the past decade, mobile users have grown from about 34 million to more than 203 million, and growth is expected to continue to increase exponentially.
MobileActive releases the newest addition to our growing resource hub: Mobile Phones for Polling and Engagement.
Polling via SMS can be a unique way to engage current supporters and attract new audiences. Polls can ask any number of questions, from opinions about an organization to views on a controversial issue. However, perhaps the most valuable aspect of polling isn’t the feedback that organizations receive directly from a poll, but rather the relationships with constituents and growing mobile support base that polls can help build.
Organizations engage in mobile polling for two reasons:
Mobile Phones for Polling and Engagement includes a case study of polls conducted by Media Focus on Africa (MFAF) as part of their Election Assistance Campaign, which sought to promote civic participation and discussion of political issues prior to the December 2007 Kenyan elections. Through SMS polling, MFAF asked its constituents some tough questions.
Should politicians accused of corruption be prevented from vying for political seats? Is tribal identity more dominant than the identity of being a Kenyan? Can voting still deliver credible results after the chaotic party nominations and bribery?
The questions were advertised on television, radio shows, and newspaper advertisements. Thousands of Kenyans responded to the polls via SMS on their mobile phones, helping to bring issues of voting and civic participation into the national conversation.
The numbers should speak for themselves. In 2006, there were 9.2 million new tuberculosis (TB) cases and 1.7 million TB deaths. Of these cases, 5.3% were a tough strain of TB that is resistant to treatment (known as MDR-TB, or multiple drug resistant tuberculosis). The total cost of TB control programs in high burden countries is estimated to be about $2.3 billion in 2008. A team of students and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up with an innovative response to this problem that uses mobile phones as both a reporting mechanism and incentive program.
Getting information in the West Bank in Palestine can be difficult. Public transportation is fragmented and some 500 checkpoints around the area make travel time-consuming and difficult. Most people don't have regular Internet access, and newspapers are expensive. A project called Souktel has stepped in to fill this information gap. The service, launched in 2006, uses SMS to connect users to two services: job opportunities and humanitarian aid. The name comes from "souk," the Arabic word for "marketplace," and "tel," or "telephone."
Jacob Korenblum, co-founder of Souktel, talked with MobileActive about the project. "At least 80% of people in the West Bank have cellphones, but Internet access is a problem for people here," Korenblum said. "So getting information about medical care, jobs, and food bank services can be difficult." Although there are Internet cafes, Korenblum said that many people, especially women, lack access to these services. "We wanted to develop a very simple service," Korenblum said.
A new report, Perceived economic benefits of telecom access at the Bottom of the Pyramid in emerging Asia, takes a new look at the effect of mobile phones on the lives of people at the so-called 'bottom of the pyramid.' The report, published by LIRNEasia, states that although anecdotal evidence shows that mobile phones are economically beneficial to base-of-the-pyramid users, there is little empirical evidence to reinforce this claim. The authors conducted a study on mobile phone usage in five Asian countries and used the results to analyze the benefits -- economic and otherwise -- of mobiles on users at the bottom of the pyramid.
There is a plethora of small studies and anecdotal evidence that show the economic impact of mobile phones on small groups or communities of users, such as studies of fisherman in Porto da Manga, Brazil, and Moree, Ghana.
Within the next few months, ZMQ Software Systems will be launching new mobile games to educate people about climate change as part of its Connect2Climate initiative. The first three games that ZMQ will release are called Polar Teddy Quiz, Mission Lighting, and DeCarbonator. On their website, ZMQ explains why they choose to use mobile phones for the games:
Dr. Joel Selanikio believes in the value of the news. "It's one of my core beliefs that the more people know, the better decisions people are going to make," he said. Selanikio, the director of DataDyne.org, was recently awarded a Knight News Challenge grant for a project that distributes news on mobile phones.
Selanikio sat down with MobileActive for a discussion about his project. Selanikio isn't new to mobile phones. As director of DataDyne.org, he has used mobile phones for data collection with EpiSurveyor (read more about this in Wireless for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use.) He is also part of a consortium on mobile data collection, OpenROSA.
For 40,000 people a year across the U.S., voicemail is a lifeline. The Community Voice Mail (CVM) program, started in 1991, has helped provide over 40,000 homeless and low-income individuals each year with access to voicemail in 41 U.S. cities. For many CVM clients, their voicemail is their connection to a job, an apartment, and relationships with teachers, doctors, or social service agencies. (MobileActive wrote about CVM and similar programs here). However, as mobile phones have become ubiquitous across the United States -- even in the hands of homeless people -- CVM has questioned the impact and relationship of mobile phones to their traditional voicemail model.
MobileActive sat down with Steve Albertson, Director of New Initiatives at Community Voicemail, for a chat.
Roberta Lamptey Nartey, a family health practitioner in Ghana, used to rely on the walkie talkies of the security guards to communicate between hospitals where she worked. Once she wanted a woman who had had a severe asthma attack transferred from the Korle Bu Polyclinic to the surgery unit of another hospital. Nartey left a message with the night nurses to transfer her patient and wrote a note in the patient's chart, but to her chagrin, the asthmatic patient never appeared in the surgery unit. "I told the security man at the Surgical Unit to send a message to the security man at the polyclinic using his walkie talkie," Nartey wrote. "The security man at the polyclinic then went to the female ward at the polyclinic to remind the nurses on the morning shift that I was waiting at the Surgery Ward." After several layers of communication, Nartey's patient finally made it to surgery.
Two organizations in the MobileActive community were recently awarded Knight News Challenge Grants, given annually to fund "innovative digital projects around the world." There were 16 awards given in all to projects that use digital and open source technology to provide public-interest news.
Bev Clark, the co-founder of Kubatana.net, was awarded the largest grant in the Challenge for Freedom Fone, a way to distribute news and independent media:
Freedom Fone will provide a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or Internet phones... Independent radio station content will be broadcast, along with frequently updated audio reports created specifically for Freedom Fone.
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