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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

Jeff, our intern from this past summer, wanted to hack away on an open-source project over his winter break.  He created a Java library for the Mobile Commons API.  It’s released under the MIT License, so you can feel free to use it in your own applications.  Libraries like this one really lower the barrier-to-entry for developers looking to integrate SMS and voice into their Java applications.

Are you interested in contributing to the open-source community?  If you have used our API in the past and want to release your code, let us know.  Just email us at developers@mcommons.com and we’ll showcase you and your work on our site!

2008 was an exciting year for nonprofit mobile programs. Our friends at the Mobile Giving Foundation have gotten a lot of attention and deserve a huge amount of credit for convincing the major wireless carriers to pass through 100% of text-messaging donations raised through to the nonprofit community.

Our resolution is to work with the nonprofit community to make Mobile Fundraising really work for them.

How can we improve Mobile Fundraising 1.0?

If your organization gets a $5 gift, even if it gets a lot of $5 gifts, how valuable is the $5 if you can’t communicate further with your donor and continue building the relationship?

What if you could get a $5 donation and send a personalized thank you note? What if you could ask your donor to attend an event, participate in a call-in advocacy campaign, spread things online, or volunteer at a local chapter? What if you could ask that same $5 donor to give again? What if you could build clever social networking applications to rally huge groups of people that you can follow up with later? What if you could capture your donors’ email addresses, synchronize them with your CRM, and coordinate your next online giving campaign with text message reminders to participate?

Mobile Commons resolves to work to make all those things possible that aren’t currently available with the existing mobile giving applications (including our own), make them easy to use, and make them produce real results.

We can’t do it alone. Want to join our resolution? Text “RESULTS” to 69866!

At the invitation of Convio, other bloggers have also written about their 2009 resolutions. Here’s to sticking with them:

• Judi Sohn at A View from Judi Sohn
• Michael Cervino at Beaconfire Wire
• Beth Kanter at Beth’s Blog
• Jordan Viator at Convio Connection Café
• Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog
• David Neff at FI Space
• Holly Ross at NTEN Blog
• Roger Carr at Everyday Giving Blog
• Peter Deitz at Social Actions Blog
• Robert L. Weiner at Tech Soup and Robert L. Weiner Blog
• Wendy Covey at TREW Marketing Spotlight

• Mobile Giving Client for Ruby: Mobile Commons software enables non-profits to collect charitable donations over SMS. We partner with an organization called the Mobile Giving Foundation to handle the billing and carrier relations. They provide and API to their service and we’ve written a Ruby library to use with it.
• Google Annotated Timeline for Rails: Google’s Visualization API provides a really slick Flash-based line graph that we’ve started using in our application. We wrote a Rails plugin that makes including these timelines in your web applications very easy. Look for more use of these interactive graphs in upcoming Mobile Commons releases.
• Active Record Export to CSV This is a little extension that makes it really easy to export data to CSV from a Rails project. Every time you export your data from our application, you’re using this handy extension.

While this blog post was a little on the geeky side, all this code plays an important role in making the Mobile Commons applications run. With these open-source releases, we hope others in the developer community can benefit too!

You can find all our API documentation and open-source code on our Developer site at http://mcommons.com/developers.

Mobile Commons’ platform is a complete tool for nonprofits mobile programs—people can raise money, generate huge responses, and participate in effective advocacy. One of the best ways to generate telephone calls for fundraising or advocacy is mConnect, our product that lets you send out a broadcast text message with an embedded phone number. Users call, hear audio talking points, and are transferred to a destination.

In the advocacy space, our customers often want to connect people to their legislators or target specific legislators. Wouldn’t it be cool if users were automatically routed directly to their legislator without having to go through the congressional switchboard? We thought so too! But first we needed a way to determine a person’s legislator…

Today we are releasing a database for querying congressional and state legislators by latitude & longitude.

There are two parts to this project:

• An open-source application and database that you can host yourself
• A publicly available web service that anyone can use: http://congress.mcommons.com

This was the first phase of our legislative targeting. In the next few weeks, we’ll finish integrating this data into all our products. Soon you will be able to send targeted messages to constituents in a city, state, radius, or specific legislative district. When users make advocacy phone calls, we will automatically route them directly to their legislator. Stay tuned!

Learn more about our legislative lookup project on our Developer site, or try it out at http://congress.mcommons.com.

text pp then your street address and zip to 69866 (eg: pp 101 market st 94105)

Our system will respond with the appropriate polling place for your address, or the number for the Election Protection Coalition if we can’t find a match. Please feel free to promote this service any way you like and share it with people looking lost on Election Day.

Some of our customers will also be using this tool in conjunction with their election day txt message voting reminders. We think that this will be a particularly powerful tool for canvassers in the field who need to provide information to voters on the fly.  If SMS isn’t your thing, you can also look up your polling place on the web at GoVote.org.

Other Mobile Commons customers are also using txt messaging to help distribute early voting information.  In North Carolina, the State Democratic Party is using an mData to allow their constituents to txt ‘EARLY’ and the name of their county to 69866 to get the address of their early voting location.

The team here at Mobile Commons will be using these services to get ourselves to the polls  – we hope you do too.