We’re all familiar with getting form letters and emails that are addressed to us personally. For example, “Dear Benjamin, we have a special offer for you.” But did you know you can do that with your text messages too? When composing outgoing text message in Mobile Commons, you can add special characters to the message and it will automatically be merged with the recipients personalized information.

For example, “A special offer for you, ((first_name)). Visit any local store in ((city)) for 10% off.” will be delivered to my phone saying “A special offer for you, Benjamin. Visit any local store in Brooklyn for 10% off.”

The data fields such as name and address are automatically pulled from your Mobile Commons profile database. It’s easy to populate these fields in your database. You can import them yourself, data sync with your CRM platform, or even ask people to text in their information. Mobile Commons can automatically collect Name, Email, Address, and many, many more fields directly out of a text message.

Want to learn more about personalizing your text messages using mail merge? Just email us at info@mcom.ms.

Congratulations to The Takeaway, WNYC, Public Radio International, Public Insight Journalism and WDET Detroit on their 2010 Knight-Batten Award for the Sourcing through Texting project.

From the official site:

A team from The Takeaway radio show joined journalists from WDET Detroit in a successful experiment that prompted residents to text tips about particular stories from Mexicantown in Southwest Detroit. Residents texted information about trucks illegally barreling down their side streets, and in another experiment, they sent keywords describing their neighborhoods. The result: non-listeners became engaged and more informed. The experiment has continued in Miami’s Little Haiti.

Alisa Miller, the CEO of Public Radio International, has a very nice insider view of the Sourcing through Texting project written up on her blog.

At Mobile Commons, we continue to be impressed and humbled by all the innovative ways our customers use mobile technology to connect with people. We work hard to create simple yet powerful tools and put them in the hands of smart, creative people; it’s amazing to see what they come up with! Great work to everyone at The Takeaway, WNYC, WDET and all the organizations who participated in this project.

With only 160 characters, it’s sometimes tough to fit those long URLs into your messages. Popular services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com can help shorten your long web links for you, but did you know that Mobile Commons can do it too?

Mobile Commons takes link shortening to the next level: every phone gets their own unique shortened link.

For example, let’s say you shorten http://www.mobilecommons.com. One person will get a link http://lil.ms/1ex and another will get http://lil.ms/1qo. When clicked, both links automatically redirect to http://www.mobilecommons.com. But now you can tell who clicked since each and every link is unique. And once they’ve clicked, you now know what type of browser and handset they use. If you’ve ever added links to your outgoing email messages and looked at the reports, you already know exactly how this works.

Using Mobile Commons link shortener, you can now add mobile web browsing behavior to your customer database and segment accordingly. Mobile Commons is the only platform that lets you construct profiles based on all mobile behavior, including text messages, phone calls, mobile web browsing, and, for our nonprofit customers, mobile donations.

Getting started with link shortening is easy. Just enclose a URL in double parenthesis when composing any text message, for example “Visit ((http://www.mobilecommons.com)) to learn more” and we take care of the rest!

Extra Tip: Don’t forget the “http://” part. Many phones require that to make the links clickable.

AmeriCares, Catholic Relief Services and Habitat for Humanity adopt mobile for engaging supporters and fundraising

NEW YORK – March 8, 2010 – In the aftermath of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile, nonprofit organizations raced to mobilize aid and plan recovery efforts, while also raising resources and funds to support their humanitarian programs in Chile. Mobile Communications and Mobile Fundraising have become critical components to nonprofit outreach programs.

In response, AmeriCares, Catholic Relief Services and Habitat for Humanity have expanded their use of SMS and mobile marketing beyond just text-to-give to include critical, informational updates on their relief efforts to donors, as well as to bring new supporters into their organizations.

The following organizations are running Chile Earthquake Relief programs, powered by Mobile Commons:

• Text LIVE to 25383 to donate $10 to AmeriCares
• Text QUAKE to 25383 to donate $10 to Catholic Relief Services
• Text CHILE to 25383 to donate $10 to Habitat for Humanity

To complete your mobile donation, simply reply YES to confirm a one-time donation. Your donation
will appear on your mobile phone bill. All donations are tax-deductible.

“Our ability to have a dialogue with our supporters via mobile messaging allows us to have an ongoing relationship with them, beyond just making a text donation. This is especially important to organizations like Habitat as our supporters really want to be connected to our efforts,” said Tim Daugherty, senior director, Direct Marketing for Habitat for Humanity.

“The recent Haiti Relief efforts were breathtaking. Dozens of organizations were able to immediately launch a response using their mobile programs. For Chile, organizations further advanced their use of mobile SMS messaging to a highly-effective communications medium that also includes immediate fundraising,” added Anthony Risicato, CEO of Mobile Commons. “We’re extremely fortunate to work with non-profits who can have such a direct, positive impact and who continue to innovate – driving the entire industry forward.”

About AmeriCares
AmeriCares is a nonprofit international disaster relief and humanitarian aid organization, which delivers medicines, medical supplies and aid to people in crisis around the world. Since it was established in 1982, AmeriCares has distributed more than $9.0 billion in humanitarian aid to 137 countries. For more information, log onto www.AmeriCares.org.

About Catholic Relief Services
Catholic Relief Services is the international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. The agency provides assistance to people in more than 100 countries and territories based on need, regardless of race, nationality or creed. For more information, please visit http://www.crs.org or http://www.crsespanol.org.

About Habitat for Humanity
Habitat for Humanity International is an ecumenical Christian ministry that welcomes to its work all people dedicated to the cause of eliminating poverty housing. Since its founding in 1976, Habitat has built, rehabilitated, repaired or improved more than 350,000 houses worldwide, providing simple, decent and affordable shelter for more than 1.75 million people. For more information, or to donate or volunteer, visit www.habitat.org.

About Mobile Commons
Mobile Commons pioneers easy-to-use technology for scalable mobile marketing campaign management. The company’s award-winning mobile messaging platform helps non-profits, brands and agencies quickly launch and manage mobile marketing campaigns from one Web-based user interface coupled with powerful analytics and reporting. The platform’s user interface and APIs seamlessly integrate SMS, voice and Web applications with CRMs and databases, as well as Twitter, Facebook applications, flash widgets, and geo-location features.
Mobile Commons’ technology has powered hundreds of successful mobile campaigns in the brand advertising, agency, advocacy, political and charitable giving sectors, including Credo Mobile, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Oxfam International, Andre Agassi Foundation, ASPCA, NYC Department of Public Health, Care USA, National Association of Realtors, National Basketball Association’s (NBA’s) Sacramento Kings, DoSomething.org, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and more. Mobile Commons is also an approved provider of Mobile Giving programs, and a member of the Mobile Giving Foundation (http://mobilegiving.org/). For more information, please visit: http://MobileCommons.com or text MCOM to 30644.

Press Contact:
press@mobilecommons.com
+1.212.537.5175

Download a pdf of the full release.