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.
First of all, I would like to introduce myself; I’m Nathan Woodhull. I joined the Mobile Commons team as a Software Developer a month and a half ago, and have been busy adding features and working to improve the performance of the platform ever since. I came here to New York from the Boston area where I worked as a consultant to organizations including ActBlue, The Public Radio Exchange, and MoveOn.
One of the great things about working at Mobile Commons is seeing how our amazing customers use our platform. Credo Wireless, an early Mobile Commons customer, in partnership with the Student PIRGS New Voters Project and the University of Notre Dame just released a study testing txt messaging as a voter turnout tool. On Super Tuesday, during the 2008 primary season they sent out reminder messages to a group of mostly young voters and compared their turnout to a control group of similar voters. The findings indicate that sending a voter a txt message reminder on election day increases their likelihood of voting by 4.6% – numbers that are consistent with an earlier 2006 study.
Many of our customers plan to take advantage of this on November 4th because of the significant cost-per-vote advantages of txt messaging—we’re anticipating the biggest single day use of our platform to date. We are incredibly excited about that, and everything else our customers are doing this election season.
We’ve always thought that one of the best ways to delight our customers and their constituents is to come up with simple solutions that get the job done—they don’t need to be flashy. FishPhone has been a runaway SMS success and we think it’s due to a couple of factors:
People care about the information
It’s easy to show friends how it works
Using SMS as an input interface is much easier than using the mobile web on most phones
It’s easy to try out by texting fish + species to 30644. As you can see on the example on the right, Cool Hunting texted in FISH salmon to 30644.
Rock the Vote’s Executive Director Heather Smith shared one of the organization’s most effective strategies on a panel earlier this year: fueling the youth movement on the “4th screen” to mobilize youth voters like never before. And though text messaging may sound like an unlikely tactic to get Gen Yers to take action (and rather one that’s primarily used as a social communications tool) Rock the Vote’s results are astounding.
Out of the 1.4 million names they have in their email house file (as of May of 2008), 12% opt in to cell phone messaging. And when texts are sent out on Election Day with a reminder to vote and a link to the voter’s poll location, turnout increases by 4%.
I think one of the main points to be emphasized is the personal nature of text-messaging. Heather says that a text message reminder is as effective as a qualified phone call. This is a point that we’ve made before, but is really the thing about text messaging that’s beginning to get a lot of positive numbers behind it.
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.
We’ve always thought that one of the best ways to delight our customers and their constituents is to come up with simple solutions that get the job done—they don’t need to be flashy. FishPhone has been a runaway SMS success and we think it’s due to a couple of factors:
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