Over the last few months, one of our savviest clients, AFSCME, has adopted new ways to engage their members using voice and mobile technology, leading the labor movement in grassroots advocacy.

Check out these examples:

Web-driven voice advocacy through the “Make America Happen” Campaign

AFSCME sends emails to their list to drive constituents to web forms for congressional voice advocacy.

Make America Happen Campaign Results:

Over a two week span when the Obama Jobs and Recovery package was being debated in Congress, AFSCME sent out three standalone emails that generated approximately 1,000 calls to Congress in support of the bill. Additionally, AFSCME has been building their text messaging file by converting email subscribers into text subscribers as an optional check box in the web form. In the future, they will drive response via SMS.

Advocacy at Live Events

At their recent conferences, AFSCME asked their audience to text “happen”  69866 to make calls into Congress.

Results: They have seen response rates as high as 53% for people in the room texting in (225 person conference, 119 opt-ins) and 42% response rates on broadcast text-to-call messages sent later that day to generate calls. (119 opt-ins, 50 calls generated)

Targeting state legislators

AFSCME has also used mobile to target state legislators. This strategy gets their affiliates involved and targets legislators who get calls less frequently, which means the calls are typically more effective.

Thanks so much to Tracey Conaty, Assistant Director of Online Communications, at AFSCME for sharing the results and to our friends at the Watershed Company for all their hard work!

A couple years ago, Starbucks rolled out a popular SMS application. Users could text their zip code to MYSBUX and they would get back the closest Starbucks location. Google has an SMS service that lets you text in to GOOGLE and get back weather, directions, sports scores and more.

Mobile Commons has a similar application that our customers use to make their own SMS lookup services. Organizations can quickly create a service that users can text to and get back information quickly. For example, text ‘FISH SALMON’ 30644 and you’ll get a response letting you know if there are any health or environmental concerns with it (courtesy of Blue Ocean Institute). Text SHOP and the name of a company to 30644 to find out if they are LGBT friendly (courtesy of HRC).

We often get requests to make services based on location; in other words, a private-label Starbucks locator. Some organizations have faked it by uploading a database of zip codes. This works great but takes a lot of work and doesn’t handle people texting in their address. As we mentioned a couple days ago, we’ve been working hard integrating location information into everything we do. Today we are very excited to announce that we have added automatic location information to our SMS database applications.

How does it work? First, you upload your database as a spreadsheet with two columns: input and output. Check the box that says “Treat inputs as geographic locations”. That’s it!

Now you can instruct people to text your keyword plus their address. We automatically find the closest geographic match and text it to you. They can text in their full address, city, zip code - it doesn’t matter. We can handle it all.

This is best illustrated with an example. Let’s create a service to find the closest Mobile Commons office via SMS. Here’s our sample CSV file:

"input","output"
"86 Chambers St, New York NY 10007","The closest Mobile Commons office is at 86 Chambers St, New York NY 10007"
"100 Bush St, San Francisco CA 94104","The closest Mobile Commons office is at 100 Bush St, San Francisco CA 94104"


I copy-and-pasted the above text into our application and hit “Save”. Finally, I chose the keyword “mcommons” and added a default response.

Try it! Text MCOMMONS and your address to 30644 and we’ll reply with our closest office.

Now imagine you’re a retail business and you want to build a store locator. Easy! Just upload a spreadsheet of your store addresses in one column and your contact information in the other. We automatically take care of the rest. Want to advertise local events, rallies, or house parties. No problem!

It’s a “Starbucks Locator” for the rest of us!

Over the past few months, we’ve slowly been incorporating location information to all parts of the Mobile Commons application. Every phone & profile in our database is now associated with a geographical location and location is added for all new users. (Note: we aren’t tracking users in real-time; just their address).

Locations can be as accurate as a home address or as general as a city, depending on the information your users share with you. For example, if someone texts in a zip code, we can figure out their city and state. If they fill out their mailing address a web form, we’ll add it to their profile. And of course you can manually edit any profile or import your own CRM data and we’ll use that instead. Once we stored everyone’s location information, the next step was to find everyone’s legislators. We went through every profile and updated their profile with their congressional district.

Now that the data is in place, we can start doing some really cool things:

Advanced Group Targeting:
Armed with latitude, longitude and congressional district, we were able to really improve your ability to create groups of users:

• Reach out to people only in a certain state (e.g. only text people in California)
• Advertise events near a particular city (e.g. text everyone within 25 miles of New York City)
• Target specific legislators (e.g. text everyone in the NY-01 congressional district)

And while we were at it, we also created some useful new group functionality for our advanced users:

• Create groups that contain other groups
• Exclude people from your groups based on search criteria
• Finer grained control of AND and OR logic

For example, you can target a group that includes everyone in California but except Los Angeles and excludes an uploaded list of your major donors.

Targeted Legislative Call Campaigns
Our customers have run some amazing legislative call campaigns over the past couple years, really helping to affect change in policy. But with the addition of location information, we can now take these call campaigns to a whole new level!

When we first introduced mConnect, all calls were routed to the capitol switchboard and users asked to be connected to their representative. Now that we know everyone’s representative, we can automatically route the call to the correct destination! This eliminates the switchboard operators as a potential bottleneck and makes for a fantastic user experience. Not only that, but your organization can see in real-time exactly which legislators were called and how the call was made — from the web, Facebook, email, or text message.

To take it a step further, we realize that organizations don’t always want a shotgun approach; they would rather target specific legislators. With Advanced Targeting, you can now select particular senators to target. This enables your organization maximize your efforts and reach exactly the legislators that you need to.

Got some great ideas that you’d like to see incorporated into our platform? Feel free to leave a comment below. Ready to get started with mobile? Contact us or find us on Twitter @mobilecommons.

We spent a lot of time at the end of 2008 working with one of our clients, the Humane Society of the United States, and our friends at the Watershed Company to come up with a nice mobile test for end of year fundraising. We wanted to give mobile subscribers an option to donate over the phone via an inbound call center after they received a text message promoting the call.

It didn’t quite work out the way we planned; we received no donations over the phone.

It did, however, produce a very interesting result–people who got the text message gave online with an increased response rate of 77%!

We suppressed a third of their list to see if the text had any effect on online giving, and it turned out to have a huge impact.

Download the Full Case Study (pdf)

We are excited about all the different ways people are pushing mobile fundraising and we hope that this integrated approach becomes another arrow in the mobile fundraising quiver.