The House and Senate may have left Washington DC for their summer recess, but nobody else is resting! Don’t forget that you can still reach your representatives at their district offices too.

With so much important legislation being debated this summer, it’s critical that your constituents and supporters have their voices heard. One of the most effective ways to drive phone calls is with a call-to-action via SMS. We all know that response rates drop off with each extra step a user has to go through to connect to their representative. This is why Mobile Commons has always been able automatically route callers directly to their Senator or Congressperson without going through the switchboard. Because every caller in our database is geo-located, we already know the congressional district of the caller as soon as they get on the phone.

When setting up a legislative call campaign, you should always think about exactly where you want your calls to go. Is the senate in session? Or are they home for recess. With our tools, it’s easy to automatically route callers directly to their legislator’s capitol office, to any of their district offices, or just connect them to any available office we can find.

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.

Our goal at Mobile Commons has always been to provide our customers with the best tools to run the most successful mobile campaigns. Today we’re pleased to announce both Twitter and Facebook integration into the Mobile Commons platform!

Twitter has had phenomenal growth over the past year and organizations have been very quick to embrace Twitter as part of their media strategy. In addition to mobile, many of our customers also use Twitter as a way of communicating. To integrate with Twitter, click the ‘Setup’ tab in your Mobile Commons account and enter your Twitter login information. Once you do this, a new “Send to Twitter” checkbox will appear as an option whenever you schedule a broadcast. If you check the box, your message will simultaneously be posted to Twitter as well as to your mobile list!

The popularity of Facebook goes without saying. We’ve had Facebook apps available in beta for a while and they officially launched this week! We’ve gotten great feedback as customers have used our Facebook apps to collect mobile donations, trigger calls to the White House, and get supporters to join their mobile lists. Facebook integration really is incredible and deserves it’s own blog post which is coming soon. If you have any questions or would like advice on getting started with Facebook, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be happy to help!

These new features are part of a larger trend we’re seeing based on connecting mobile technology to the web. Many of our tools have had web components for a long time: Mobile donations and phone calls can be triggered by filling out a web form. mData databases can be queried from a Flash widget. mCast text-to-screen apps can shown anywhere on the web. We’ve been working hard to expand beyond static sites and really connect you with the social graph. With our Facebook and Twitter integration, we continue to lead the way helping organizations spread their ideas, extend their reach, and accomplish their goals!