Over the last few months, one of our savviest clients, AFSCME, has adopted new ways to engage their members using voice and mobile technology, leading the labor movement in grassroots advocacy.

Check out these examples:

Web-driven voice advocacy through the “Make America Happen” Campaign

AFSCME sends emails to their list to drive constituents to web forms for congressional voice advocacy.

Make America Happen Campaign Results:

Over a two week span when the Obama Jobs and Recovery package was being debated in Congress, AFSCME sent out three standalone emails that generated approximately 1,000 calls to Congress in support of the bill. Additionally, AFSCME has been building their text messaging file by converting email subscribers into text subscribers as an optional check box in the web form. In the future, they will drive response via SMS.

Advocacy at Live Events

At their recent conferences, AFSCME asked their audience to text “happen”  69866 to make calls into Congress.

Results: They have seen response rates as high as 53% for people in the room texting in (225 person conference, 119 opt-ins) and 42% response rates on broadcast text-to-call messages sent later that day to generate calls. (119 opt-ins, 50 calls generated)

Targeting state legislators

AFSCME has also used mobile to target state legislators. This strategy gets their affiliates involved and targets legislators who get calls less frequently, which means the calls are typically more effective.

Thanks so much to Tracey Conaty, Assistant Director of Online Communications, at AFSCME for sharing the results and to our friends at the Watershed Company for all their hard work!

We spent a lot of time at the end of 2008 working with one of our clients, the Humane Society of the United States, and our friends at the Watershed Company to come up with a nice mobile test for end of year fundraising. We wanted to give mobile subscribers an option to donate over the phone via an inbound call center after they received a text message promoting the call.

It didn’t quite work out the way we planned; we received no donations over the phone.

It did, however, produce a very interesting result–people who got the text message gave online with an increased response rate of 77%!

We suppressed a third of their list to see if the text had any effect on online giving, and it turned out to have a huge impact.

Download the Full Case Study (pdf)

We are excited about all the different ways people are pushing mobile fundraising and we hope that this integrated approach becomes another arrow in the mobile fundraising quiver.

“You have one cell phone number and generally it does stay with you forever. A lot of folks on our file at HRC have 3, 4, 5 email addresses and it gets really complicated to match them and figure out who they all are, but they only have one cellphone.” – Dane Grams, HRC

 

Dane Grams of HRC gave a presentation at the DMA 2009 Washington Nonprofit Conference session titled “New Media Channels — Adding Text Messaging, Social Networks and Media to the Marketing Mix” last Friday. Also on the panel were Scott Goodstein from the Obama campaign and Grace Markarian of the Humane Society (HSUS). We’ve embedded the full 8-minute video below.

One of the main points that Dane addresses is that organizations have causes that matter and can run highly effective campaigns even though they don’t have Obama as their figurehead. At Mobile Commons, we’ve seen proof of this again and again as we see people use our tools to spread causes and ideas they care about (and now we’ve made that even easier by tying into Facebook and Twitter). Dane and Grace have both had great successes with Mobile Commons and Convio eCRM integration and will continue to because they’ve embraced mobile as an ongoing part of their communications and are constantly looking for ways to engage more deeply with their constituents.

Thanks to Tad at Convio for posting the great video.

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.