Imagine you’re at a rally with thousands of your supporters. You ask them to join your effort by taking out their mobile phones and sending a one-word text message to a 5-digit number. They do so, and they immediately receive a message back thanking them for joining and telling them to expect periodic updates and action items from your team.

A few days later, Congress schedules a vote on an issue that’s important to your organization. You send a text message that contains a phone number to your supporters, who then make the call in just a few clicks. They hear your pre-recorded talking points audio message and are then routed immediately to the office of their senator or congressman.

These are just a few of the many ways that mobile can help you recruit supporters, provide them with information they want, and call them to action. Just as importantly, mobile can help you streamline your internal organizational processes. For example, politicians and other organizations concerned with getting out the vote will be interested to learn about mobile walk lists, which allow volunteers going door-to-door to easily update records and databases via text message.

These applications are available right now, and they are going to have a big impact on the 2008 elections. Before we get to that, though, we want to talk about some of the essentials that you’ll need to know in order to get started with mobile.

What is Mobile and Who Uses It?

Mobile refers to a whole range of communications tools and channels that are accessible via mobile phones. Text messaging (or SMS), picture and video messaging, voice and data applications, mobile information services, ringtones, and wallpapers all fall under the "mobile" umbrella.

Who uses mobile? The short answer is everyone. There are over 240 million mobile subscribers in the US, or 4 out of every 5 Americans. Almost two-thirds of mobile subscribers use SMS. Currently Americans send 20 billion SMS messages every month, and this number is doubling every year. As one would expect, mobile – and SMS in particular – is most popular with youth. A more surprising statistic is that SMS is popular in almost every other demographic as well. For example, over 33% of Americans aged 45-54 use SMS. Furthermore, these numbers have not yet come close to peaking.

Mobile tools like text messaging and picture messaging are considerably more popular in black and Hispanic communities than in other demographics. Much of the organizing behind the massive immigration protests that took place in cities across America in early 2006 was conducted via SMS. As political consultant Joe Trippi has pointed out, "Members of that community may not have a $2,000 laptop, but they probably have a $20 text-messaging cell phone."

How Does Mobile Differ from Other Media?

The mobile phone occupies a unique place in people's lives – it's the one device they have with them all the time. It's also a device which many people use to express themselves. (Witness the proliferation of ringtones, wallpapers, screensavers, face covers, and other ways that people personalize their phones.) For these reasons, people are more protective of their mobile phone numbers than, say, their email addresses. The upside is that because SMS is a non-spam medium, users tend to take incoming messages seriously; over 90% of text messages are opened, whereas only a fraction of email is opened. And because mobile users have their phones on them at all times, they are available to respond to outreach around the clock. Most text messages are opened within 15 minutes to an hour, whereas email is usually opened within 24-48 hours.

This graph should give you a sense of the immediacy of a mobile response. In this campaign, users received a text message containing a phone number for them to call at 7:05 pm on June 21st. As you can see, most of the users who responded did so by making their calls within the first hour of receiving the message.

Challenges and Opportunities

Americans are conducting a larger proportion of their telephone communication via mobile devices. Already, 12% of American adults have replaced their landline with a mobile phone, and this trend is accelerating. (This figure includes 15% of Hispanic adults, 13% of black adults, 12% of Asian adults, and 11% of white adults, as well as 22% of the poorest adults.) These patterns have significant implications for politics. Because no mobile phone directory exists, for example, politicians and organizations are searching for new ways to conduct polls, solicit donations, and turn out the vote on Election Day.

While America's growing preference for mobile presents challenges for politically focused organizations, it also offers new and exciting opportunities. Mobile spam is both illegal and doesn't work. (Carriers will shut down mobile spam programs without hesitation, so keep your distance from hucksters who would sell you lists of mobile numbers.) What you want instead is the opportunity to communicate with a dedicated, enthusiastic group of supporters who are ready to take action for your cause. And when that becomes your standard - as it should for any organization that actually wants to make a difference - mobile becomes invaluable.

Acquiring Supporters and Calling Them to Action

The first step to creating an effective mobile network, then, is getting people to join. There are a number of ways to do this. One is to ask your target audience to text a keyword to a shortcode (e.g. Text "NPI" to 30644) from their mobile phones. Another is to solicit opt-ins via a form on your website. When users opt in via either method, they receive an immediate response message welcoming them to your campaign.

Once you have a list of supporters in your database, you can reach out to them via text message and provide them with important information. More importantly, you can ask them to take action, including:

• Advocacy: Include a phone number in your text message to connect users to their congressperson.
• Signing Petitions: Have users respond to a text message with their names. These names (like all of the messages your users send) can be captured in a database.
• Publishing: Feed your users' responses directly onto a blog, webpage, or even onto a Jumbotron during a live event.
• Meeting Up for Rallies and Other Live Events: Provide your users with event details and encourage them to attend. (Not only can text messages be used to plan events ahead of time, but they can also be used to improvise during events - allowing protesters and marchers to organize and re-organize themselves in real time.)
• Real-Time Media Rapid Response: Is your opponent slinging mud at your candidate on TV or radio? Mobilize an immediate response by texting your supporters and encouraging them to call in and defend your candidate.
• Database-Building: Ask your users to submit additional contact information.

Fundraising

There are a number of ways to use mobile to extend your fundraising efforts. The easiest way is to include a phone number in a text message that connects users with a call center. (Users don’t even have to dial the number; they can be connected in just a few clicks.) John Edwards' presidential campaign recently ran the first mobile fundraising campaign using this technique. Users connected to the number, heard a message from Senator Edwards, and were then given the option to press 1 to connect to an operator at campaign headquarters.

The second method of mobile fundraising is via direct mobile payment (Premium SMS or PSMS) - that is, allowing a user to send a message indicating that she wishes to donate, say, $10 to an organization by having that charge added to her next bill. We don’t recommend this method, however, as it presents significant obstacles. One is the carriers; at present, the carriers keep 40-60% of mobile donations for themselves. And because of the way their billing and payment processing schedules work, the carriers can take upwards of 2-3 months to deliver payment. Additionally, it is difficult to incorporate federally mandated campaign finance disclosure questions.

The mobile industry is currently working with the carriers to try to reduce the barriers to PSMS-based mobile fundraising. In the meantime, a good substitute tactic is to ask users to pledge money via text message and then follow up immediately with a phone call.

Advanced Mobile

In addition to running these basic mobile applications, it is now possible to do more - to use mobile as a bridge between your candidate or organization and everyone's mobile phone. The most successful politicians in the next cycle and beyond will be the ones who use text, data, and voice to create mobile applications that provide meaningful new ways for supporters to participate in campaigns. The next few sections discuss some of these more advanced mobile applications.

• Voice Integration

Voice and SMS can be combined for powerful results. By embedding a telephone number in an SMS message, organizations can allow users to make calls automatically or with a couple of clicks. The call is then automatically routed to the appropriate number (say, the user’s congressperson) based on user information, and full call data (length, outcome, etc.) is tracked in real time. These sorts of programs generate very high response rates.

As we mentioned above, a great technique when asking supporters to make phone calls is to play pre-recorded "talking points" audio messages before forwarding them to a live person. Working Assets ran an extremely effective call-in campaign of this kind during Congress' first 100 hours. Working Assets texted their supporters and asked them to call Congress in support of three separate bills. Before being connected to Congress, users listened to a short audio recording that included a summary of the issues and specific points to raise during conversations with their congressperson’s office. Among supporters recruited specifically for this program, the response rates were 28.8% for the first call-in campaign, 31.4% for the second, and 18.3% for the third.

• Mobile Information Services

Organizations can also offer their supporters access to web-based databases via mobile, even if their users don't have internet-enabled phones. By uploading databases and then selecting keywords that correspond to the data, organizations make it possible for their users to obtain information via text message. For example, the NRDC will soon launch a program that allows users to text in the name of a product and receive information about whether that product is environmentally sound. Users will also be able to text in the name of a category of products and receive a list of environmentally sound products in that category.

Earlier this year, the National Alliance for Hispanic Health began offering a program that allows users in select cities to text AIR + zip code (e.g. AIR 10007) to receive an up-to-the-hour pollution report for their area.

It's easy to imagine a variety of ways for political figures and other politically-minded organizations to make use of mobile information services. A politician might use it to make information about his favorite issue available to constituents. Or an environmental organization might set up a program to allow users to text in information about their personal consumption habits and receive a text message back telling them their carbon footprint.

• Mobile Walk Lists

Imagine you’re a candidate or organization about to launch your door-to-door operation. You deploy a mobile walk-list, which allows volunteers to text in an address – say, “123 Elm Street” – and receive a list of houses to visit on that street. Each time the volunteer goes to a house, he sends a text message indicating whether the resident is home. He then receives an additional question – for example, “Is this person’s phone number 555-5555?” or “Is this person planning to vote?” – and so on. All of the volunteers’ responses are automatically collected in your database.

• Mobile Video

One day very soon, campaigns will wish to send their supporters mobile videos (say, of the candidate giving a speech or delivering a special message) and solicit videos recorded by supporters (say, of local activism on behalf of the campaign). At present, though, mobile video usage represents an incredibly small share of the mobile marketplace, and some phones are not even capable of recording or displaying video. Among phones that can perform these functions, file formats, display quality, and storage capabilities vary widely. Because of these and other hurdles, it will be difficult for politicians and other organizations to implement mobile video programs that guarantee good user experience in the near-term. For these reasons, mobile video will probably not be ripe for use in politics during the 2008 cycle. We may see some experimentation, of course, but the heyday of mobile video probably won’t arrive until the 2010 cycle.

How Do I Get Started?

First, think about your relationship with your supporters or members: what sorts of information do you want to provide them? What sorts of feedback do you want from them? And what do you want them to do? Answering these questions will help you determine the ways that mobile can be most useful for your organization.

Remember, mobile isn’t just a stand-in for email or other communication channels. Mobile is its own medium and requires its own strategy. That said, it doesn’t have to be difficult, particularly with the help of a mobile marketing professional.