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.