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!
Posted on Thursday, January 29, 2009 by ben
Mobile Commons exposes a lot of its functionality through a really simple REST API. Our customers have built lots of innovative applications on top of our platform, extending our functionality in ways we’ve never even thought of!
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!
Posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 by ben
Instead of creating a resolution for the nonprofit community, we thought we would take a look in the mirror and recruit the community to help us achieve a resolution together. We want you to help us improve Mobile Fundraising.
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:
Posted on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 by matt w.
We’ve had so much positive feedback on the release of our open source legislative lookup application that I’d like to announce a few more projects that we’ve open sourced this week:
- 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.
Posted on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 by ben
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