MobileActive Stategy Guide to Using Mobil Phones in Civic Campaigns

From MobileActive Wiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Why are mobile phones useful for activists and NGOs? 3 What are the Challenges of Using Mobiles in Civic Action Campaigns? 4 Who is using mobile phones for civic action? 5 What have mobile phones been used for to date? 6 What can you do with mobile phones in your work? 7 Strategic Considerations

Introduction

Mobile phones are tool to engage, organize, mobilize, and inform people engaged in advocacy, civic engagement, and social action. They are an additional tool in the arsenal of technology by activists who are exploring their use around the world in human rights, environmental, educational, and civic action campaigns. This guide will give an overview of the issues that activists and non-governmental organizations need to consider as they use mobile phones in their work.

Why are mobile phones useful for activists and NGOs?

• In many countries mobiles are the easiest and least expensive way to get a phone line
• Mobile phones are far more pervasive in developing countries, much more so than the Internet
• The growing infrastructure in even highly remote and rural locations makes mobile phones an accessible means of communication in the developing world, especially as prices of hardware and services are continuing to drop in many places.
• There is a relatively low learning curve to using a phone, making it far more accessible than computers to a wider range of constituents
• Mobiles are a highly personal means of communication that reaches the target constituent directly and immediately.
• They are hence conducive to instant participation and response.
• Mobiles (especially, of course, it’s voice capabilities) can make the handling of languages easier with some interesting recent examples of instant translation through distributed networks.
• Mobiles are easy to share phones when it is not possible for individuals to have their own
• Mobiles are small and highly portable, and are hence accessible when on the move and in less secure environments.
• Mobiles are becoming hybrid communications tools with varied content and convergence with other media such as the Internet. Mobiles allow for texting, increasingly have multi-media support with built-in still and video cameras, can carry games, music, ringtones, and data.

What are the Challenges of Using Mobiles in Civic Action Campaigns?

While mobile are promising for civil society action, they are, of course, not a magic bullet. There are significant challenges to using mobiles in a civic society context that are worth noting:

• Mobile phones have yet to sufficiently reach many rural areas; coverage may be an issue;
• In many countries there are mobile operator monopolies, increasing costs and posing security risks;
• There may be social or cultural issues unique to your constituency that may prevent sharing of numbers, forwarding messages, or even using phones in the way you conceive.
• Even in countries with more than one operator, the cost of hardware and services can make mobile phones inaccessible, though this is rapidly changing, especially in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia where the growth of cell phones is greatest;
• There are also significant security concerns for some activists and human rights workers in areas where SIM cards and accounts are registered and monitored by local authorities. MobileActive has developed a Security Guide for Activists that can be found at http://mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Security_Guide_for_Mobile_Activists:_Checklist_and_Tips

• Using any technology strategically is still a challenge for many NGOs and activists. This is not unique to cell phones; email, the Web, and many other issue-specific technology that has promise within a social action context have been equally as challenging for organizations to think through and implement. At the same time there are now an increasing number of support organizations and networks around the world that assist NGOs with their campaign strategy and how to integrate technology into their work.

While there are strategic and technical considerations in using mobile phones, there is also enormous potential to more fully use this technology for civil society. This guide and the other resources on the MobileActive web site and wiki (www.mobileactive.org) are intended to demystify and explore the use of mobile phones in the important work that non-governmentnal organizations and activists around the world are doing.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

MobileActive has developed a Security Guide for Activists that can be found at http://mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Security_Guide_for_Mobile_Activists:_Checklist_and_Tips

Who is using mobile phones for civic action?

There are many, varied actors using mobile phones in their civil society work. They include but are not limited to:

• NGOs and nonprofit organizations
• Loosely-organized activists
• Informal and formal citizens groups
• Governments
• Trade Unions
• Political Parties
• Journalists
• Specific constituencies such as young people and students, for example

What have mobile phones been used for to date?

While the use of mobile phones in civil society campaigns is still brand-new and explored every day, there are a number of recent innovative campaigns that are

• In the Pillipines, TextPower (www.txtpower.org), a member-based citizen advocacy and consumer rights organization, used mobile phones for mobilizing its constituents to protest rate hikes, push for government accountability, organize mass protests, and create innovative political ringtones.
• In Africa, Fahamu (www.fahamu.org) organized a cell phone petition to ratify the Protocol on the Rights of Women, with signatures submitted to the petition site via text message.
• In Burundi and the Congo, children in danger of abduction by rebel troops are protected by a network of village elders and monitors using cell phones to communicate with one another.
• In Europe, the a Million Faces campaign, an online petition to control the illegal trade in small arms, lets people send in their picture and signature via MMS and SMS.
• In the USA and Mexico, Rock the Vote and Turockesvotar are registering and turning young people out to vote through text message and mobile actions.
• In Canada and California, local nonprofits Check your Head (http://www.checkyourhead.org/) and Mobile Voter (www.mobilevoter.org) register and turn out young people with tongue-in-cheek, clever text/mobile campaigns;
• In Kenya, international and Kenyan observers conduct election monitoring with mobile phones;
• In Andizhan, Mobile Reporter brings first-hand information from the mobile phone to the web to make the world aware of the crisis in that country, when most journalists were barred from reporting from there;
• In Kuwait women organize during the elections there, circulating candidate information and irreverent jokes to each other.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: More detailed case studies describing some creative uses of mobiles in campaigns that we here at MobileActive have come across are here. (http://mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Case_Studies:_Innovative_uses_of_mobile_phones_in_campaigns)

What can you do with mobile phones in your work?

What is possible with mobile phones in the context of civic action? How are mobile phones used for civic campaigns? MobileActive assembled an overview of the varied uses of mobiles in campaigns, nonprofit and NGO work, and citizen organizing.

What is the promise of mobile phones in campaigns? For campaigners, NGOs, and activists, mobile phones can:

• Provide dynamic communications with constituents;
• are a powerful tool for organizing;
• an engaging and highly personal tool for participatory processes;
• a convenient method of providing services;
• a gateway to access other mediums, such as the internet.

Looking at the use of mobile phones around the world and across the campaigns and projects we are aware of, we compiled a matrix of uses of mobile phones. This list is, by definition, not meant to be comprehensive as there are new uses of mobile phones happening all the time, but rather meant to provide an overview of the uses of mobile phones as we have uncovered to date to provide inspiration and food for thought for you work, as well as begin to categorize the various uses of mobile phones in social change work.

Organizing and Mobilizing

• coordinate protests and flash mobs
• disseminate rapid alerts
• create and disseminate ring tones – moments of “unsilence” when ringtones play at once
• disseminate mass voice messages/voice menus for coordination and logistics
• sign people up for actions via mobile phones

Advocacy

• conduct SMS petitions
• educate on issues
• conduct surveys
• poll constituents or the public
• lobby legislators
• increase the numbers of supporters on your lists
• fundraise

Monitoring

• corruption reporting
• human rights monitoring and reporting
• documenting / monitoring with photos/video/sound
• environmental monitoring

Citizen Participation: Registering voters and getting out the vote

• registering voters by requesting materials via mobile phone
• educating voters on specific issues
• turning out voters (reminders, polling place information, etc)

Disseminating Information: Media and Journalism

• engage in citizen journalism/reporting
• reporting with mobiles to community radio
• mobile audio, video and text blogging to web sites
• access to community radio using mobile in media controlled countries
• news updates by voice or SMS
• Pre-recorded voice or audio and information call centers

Providing and coordinating services

• urgent alerts/SOS
• early warning
• emergency response and humanitarian relief coordination
• providing services to constituents via mobile phones (translation, information, etc)/ Menu-driven voice services, phone trees

Strategic Considerations

Developing a ‘mobile strategy’ as part of your civil society work is essential to make the best use of this technology and ensure that it is both furthering your overall work and is sustainable. Here are questions to consider as you embark on developing a mobile strategy:

Goals and Strategy:

• What are the overall goals of your program to which you want to apply mobile phones?
• Do you have specific objectives you are trying to accomplish (reach x number of people, get x number of responses, etc). What are they?
• How do you think mobile phones help you accomplish these goals?
• How does the use of mobile phones complement your other programs and the tools that you are currently using?

Audience:

• Who are you trying to engage/reach/mobilize?
• What do you want this constituency to do? What actions are they being asked to take?
• What is your current relationship with your target audience? How much do they know/trust you currently?
• What is their use of mobile phones currently? This might include questions such as:
  • What percentage of you target constituents has cell phone?
  • What kind of phones?
  • How are your target constituents using mobile phones now? (for voice, texting, photos, accessing the web?)
  • What is the overall environment in which you operate in regard to mobile uses?

ADDITIONAL RESOURCE: MobileActive has put together an Environmental Scan to assess the social and technology environment in regard to mobile use that is helpful when considering whether mobile phones should be part of your campaign:

Costs and Resources:

• What are the costs of your project that you should allocate to your project? (Keep it in perspective / use cost-benefit analysis)
• Break down the costs for people, technology, ,marketing, services for each component of the campaign. (this includes telcom/telephony costs as well)
• Determine what staff/people capacity you have: project coordination, communications and publicity/marketing, technical set-up and support, fundraising, on-the-ground organizing, etc.
• Do you need this to be sustainable or is this a one-off project (e.g SMS for 1-day demo doesn't require long-term resource management)?
• Scaling up - have you thought cost implications of wide-scale adoption or unexpected success! For example, if a lot more people than you expect sign up for an SMS alert service then you may have costs you hadn't anticipated.

Mobile Technology:

• What mobile aspects do you want to include in your project (voice, text, multi-media, etc)
• Consider the Rolls Royce versus a Mini dilemma and build an appropriate system (reign in your inner geek).
• What kind of project could you have using the tools you have available already e.g. a viral texting campaign, a phone tree?
• What are the scalability issues? (could your system handle a million users or only 1000 and can you deal with unexpected success?)
• Consider the connectivity (mobile and internet) of the area you're working in
• This includes questions such as: Will you be able to send messages/data across all networks you wanted (carriers, internet to telecom and back, across borders, etc.) Do carriers in your area, for example, have interoperability agreements allowing you to send messages and data from one network to another?

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: The MobileActive Guttertech Guide to SMS

Bulk SMS – A MobileActive Primer

Data

• Have you considered the costs and implications of processing non standard data (such as a voice message, or multimedia such as images)?
• Have you thought about working with standard formats for making sharing data easier between projects or organizations? For example you might want to share your election monitoring results with a national or international human rights organization.
• Have you thought about the possibility of factoring in geographical information in your data?
• Secure your data! Your data will be useless if you fail to back it up otherwise secure it!

Marketing and Messaging

• How will you market the campaign or spread the word?
• To what extent do you want to engage mainstream media? How?
• Other media? How?
• If you reply on viral dissemination, how will you get people to forward? What is the social/political climate in which you are messaging?

What are Components of Successful Mobile Marketing Campaign?

• For an effective campaign, make sure you have supporters; build your list!
• Promote your short code or number everywhere. Remember places where people wait (train stations, bus stops) etc; they are great places to advertise.
• Remember, people trust message they get on their mobile. Do not abuse that trust.
• Be highly aware of the appearance of your message as spam – the mobile device is very personal!
• Write good copy – your messages need to be concise and compelling. Remember, read rates are high!
• Consider making your messages:
  • personal
  • strictly opt-in
  • adopt European stop code/make sure people know how to opt out
  • offer incentives and ways of interacting with you, for example by providing information that can not be obtained elsewhere
  • give opportunities for people to use their voice with their mobile and to interact with you
  • Check the frequency of your messaging. Do not bombard your supporters!
  • For many campaigns, two to three messages are enough. Do no send in the evening, overnight, or early in the morning, Late morning or other times when you know your constituency uses their phones (students after school, for example) are best.
  • Give a call to action. The action you ask your supporters to take should be in close proximity to the actual event (the same day for an event, for example).

Security

Security of mobile messaging and use of mobiles in campaigns is of great concern, especially in countries where there are fears of reprisal for your work. Think through the security issues of any project or campaign carefully to not put yourself or your constituency at risk, and follow some common-sense precautions. Make sure that you:

• Have you considered the security of people running the project, collecting the data?
• Have you considered the security of your equipment (computers, phones)?
• Have you considered the security of your communications?
• Have you considered the security of your data?

ADDITONAL RESOURCES: MobileActive has developed a Security Guide for Activists

Evaluation and Post-Mortem: After the project

Since this is such a new medium in the context of civil society campaigns, there is a great deal of experimentation and trial and error in every campaign. To learn what works and what does not with the users you are trying to engage, ask yourself the following questions as you design your project:

• How will you evaluate the impact of your project during and after?
• What indicators do you have in place to monitor and assess its impact and effectiveness?
• How will you document and convey lessons learned so that you or your project does not make the same mistakes and so that others can learn from what you learned?

Conclusion:

Mobile phones have enormous potential for activists and those interested in social change to generate, engage, and activate supporters. They have been used in civil society for a few years now and we have begin to learn what works in the context of campaigns; some of which MobileActive campaigners are sharing here.

We know that messaging is fun, cool, and personal. We know that it is best if the use of mobiles in your work is part of a larger campaign and connected to the real world when you ask people to take actions. Campaigns are more likely to succeed if you have support of the core organization and, of course, ideally a large population of existing mobile users.

Mobile phones can be used for different purposes and within different contexts: they can be used to flexibly communicate with a small affinity group, to sign up large numbers of people at public events, and as a means for rapid response and action.

Mobiles are excellent when you need a measure of anonymity (through pre-paid mobile services as long as you do not need to register them) and as a way to get information into or out of information-hostile environments.

In short, if you keep some of the wisdom of organizers who have done this in mind, there is no limit to your imagination and creativity in thinking through how you can use mobile phones in your work to change the world. We are looking forward to hearing your stories and experiences!

The people in the MobileActive Network: www.mobileactive.org

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. January 2006.