Today I’m pleased to announce the first phase of a really exciting upcoming Mobile Commons project.

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.

We just launched a new mData that we are very proud of.  In partnership with Credo Mobile and the New Organizing Institute, we are now providing polling place locations via txt message.

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.

The engineers at Mobile Commons have been working very hard on our latest release and they’ve done a great job!   I just wanted to take a minute to highlight some of the exciting new under-the-hood improvements.

Usage of the Mobile Commons platform has been growing tremendously this year.  As with many software applications, as they grow, some parts don’t scale as well as others.  This fall, we took a hard look at all the bottlenecks in our software and made some great across the board performance improvements.

• Inbox: due to the popularity of mData and mCast, the number of incoming messages in our inboxes has gone through the roof!  Unfortunately, that made large inboxes load slowly.  With this new release, we have an upgraded database so your inbox will load much faster!
• Importing and Exporting CSVs: When we started this business, mobile lists were relatively small. This year we’ve seen the size of mobile lists double, triple, and quintuple due to increased SMS usage by consumers, not to mention full data integration with CRM partners like Convio and GetActive.  We’ve sped up the process of importing and exporting CSV files, allowing users to upload 10x larger files and we now process them much more quickly.
• Messaging: Part of our secret sauce is how well we are able to handle incoming text messages on a shared shortcode.  We’re constantly tweaking our algorithms to ensure that incoming messages are correctly classified.  We statistically analyzed a full year’s worth of text messages looking for false positives and other misclassifications.  Based on this research, we’re pleased to release the latest version of our text processing algorithms, increasing our lead as the best in the business!
• Security: Mobile Commons is built on the fantastic Ruby on Rails framework and we’ve upgraded to the latest version (and all our server software too).  While this won’t affect our end-users much, it’s extremely important for us stay very up-to-date with all the latest security patches.  Our engineers work really hard to keep your data safe and secure, so we just wanted to mention it.

Finally, we want to thank all of our great customers out there for running such innovative and successful programs and pushing so hard on our technology.  You’ve really forced us to work hard and make our products better and better!  It’s really exciting for engineers to see their hard work out in the real world, used in all sorts of creative ways they never intended.  Never hesitate to let us know other ways we can improve!

Oh, and speaking of algorithms and scaling databases, Mobile Commons is hiring engineers.  We’re looking for full time Ruby/Rails developers in NYC.  If you think what we’re doing sounds like fun, please drop me a line!  I’d love to hear from you.

Recently, we released a new and improved version of our mData Service. Simply: mData is the easiest way to share searchable information on every mobile phone. You can power mData by uploading a simple spreadsheet or by tying it into an existing web service. Users can then perform queries on that database by sending simple SMS messages with query parameters.

Watch a short, 3-minute screencast on the new mData.

In our new release, we focused on improving the reporting and making it easy for our customers to contextualize the results from their users and constituents. Search is a powerful tool and the data from search queries helps our customers learn a lot about their constituency’s priorities.

For example, if an organization only publishes static web pages, wallet cards, or PDF files, they’ll never learn which information their audience responds to—users will only get static information. Using mData, queries can be compared against each other.

The other thing we realized is that people are used to querying the entire web, where there is plenty of information, though much of it isn’t very good. By contrast, many of our customers are established and trusted sources of information and giving them a way to publish and easily maintain their own search benefits consumers and them. However, one of the tough things about maintaining a searchable database is telling people that you don’t have any results for their search. With our new mData, we’re ranking the top missed queries for our customers and contextualizing them so that they have a roadmap for doing new research and adding new results to their database, creating increasingly better resources for their audiences.

The new mData is a big step forward in taking the research of an organization and turning it into an easily maintainable consumer utility. It’s easy to use for organizations, easy to use for consumers—and with the new release, the quality of information will only get better with time.