FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Katrin Verclas, (413) 884-0094, katrin [at] mobileactive dot org.
Michael Stein, MobileActive Strategy Guides author: (510) 883-9997, mstein63 [at] gmail dot com.
San Francisco, October 16, 2006
Mobile phones have enormous potential in electoral, voter registration, and election monitoring campaigns, finds a MobileActive Strategy Guide released today by MobileActive, a global network of organizations and individuals using mobile phones for activism and civic engagement. The Guide can be downloaded at www.mobileactive.org.
The MobileActive Strategy Guide, the first in a series investigating the use of mobiles in civil society, targets nonprofit and non-governmental organizations involved in electoral and voter registration campaigns.
Mobile phones have become a powerful emerging tool for participation in civil society. Around the world mobile phones are used to register people to vote, encourage involvement in elections, raise money for candidates, monitor election turnout, and expose electoral fraud.
"Mobile phones are widespread," said Katrin Verclas, one of the founders of MobileActive. "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. Mobile phones offer an extremely effective way for organizations to get messages out to the public, monitor elections, and encourage voter participation."
Internationally, mobile phones have been used for systematic election monitoring Macedonia and Kenya; among women voters in Saudi Arabia, and a number of popular uprisings in the Ukraine and South Korea, to name just a few. In the US, in the 2004 election, almost 10,000 people in the United States 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.
The MobileActive 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. Other guides in the series will focus on issue advocacy, fundraising, humanitarian and disaster relief, and mobile organizing.
MobileActive Strategy Guide are made possible with support from the Surdna Foundation, a leader in supporting civic engagement and the use of technology in nonprofit organizations.