Mobile Marketer published an article this morning in which many mobile industry experts shared their opinions on ways the government could use mobile technology to help pass health care reform legislation. This seems like the perfect opportunity to share some of the exciting ways our customers have been using mobile to influence health care legislation over the past few months.

In the past 6 weeks, we’ve seen labor unions, large national advocacy groups, small local non-profits, and faith-based community organizations all effectively use mobile to reach out to their supporters around the issue of health care reform. They’ve used SMS to organize groups of people on the ground, getting their supporters to attend meetings, press conferences, and rallies. They’ve combined text messaging and automatic call routing to generate 100,000s of phone calls to the White House, to the House and and the Senate. And they’ve used SMS to drive web traffic, whether it be to a site for more information, to sign a petition or to listen live to a radio show.

Here’s just a sampling of some of the amazing ways our customers have been using mobile technology around this critical issue:

* NARAL Pro Choice sent messages to thousands of people, urging them to sign an online petition to keep anti-choice extremism out of health care legislation bills
* LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan sent a recorded audio message to union members asking for their help passing healthcare reform Bill 3200
* True Majority sent a text message broadcast asking people to call their Senators before they went on summer recess and pass health care reform
* PACT in San Jose used SMS to organize supporters on the ground and get them to a press conference at Congresswoman Lofgren’s office
* Center for Community Change has sent hundreds of thousands of calls to the White House and Congress over immigration issues, including health care reform. They’ve also targeted Congresswoman Pelosi directly, urging her to end the 5 year ban on immigrant health care
* The League of Young Voters in Maine used SMS to organize supporters on the ground, getting people to meet at Monument Square in Portland to fight for health care reform
* PICO National Networks sent SMS invitations, both in English and in Spanish, to a web site where users could listen in on a call between President Obama and the Faith Community. Over 140,000 people joined the call

We continue to be excited at how creatively and effectively our customers use our platform to reach out and connect with their supporters, to drive traffic both online and in the real-world, to motivate people to make phone calls, and to really affect change. Every day we see our customers leverage mobile technology extremely well and find new ways take advantage of the unique benefits it provides.

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.