My recent crash course in mobile marketing, SMS text campaigns and non profit rules
July 31, 2009 at 2:39 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: cell phones, ELCA, ELCA Youth Gathering, Mobile marketing, New Orleans, SMS, youth
I had my first experience as a mobile marketer! We did a text messaging campaign at the recent ELCA Youth Gathering, which drew 37,000 teenagers and their chaperones to New Orleans last week around the theme of “Jesus, Justice, Jazz”. It was — as you can imagine– a mega event, complete with christian rock, a three-story neon cross, and inspiring speakers with their contracts freshly signed. Needless to say, its hard to break through this Lutheran Disneyland with your message. Our message? your church does advocacy and cares about justice, and you can get involved. Our mode? The text.
After some harried web searching, thank god for Mobile Active’s list, and this great how-to primer, it seemed there are really only two vendors out there doing the non-profit text thing: Mobile Accord and Mobile Commons. We went for the Mgive platform from Mobile Accord because it was cheaper (they are based in Denver), while the Mobile Commons (NYC baby!) had more services to offer that we did not really need. These mobile programs are set up mainly to solicit donations, usually $5 off the phone bill, the main example out there is Alicia Key’s Keep a Child Alive mobile campaign. However, the ELCA is a church, and 501-c-3, but does not file a 990 - and therefore we are not elegible to recieve donations through the Mobile Giving Foundation. Thus we could not purchase any of the packages offered by mGive set up to get donations.
It worked out though – we just bought a keyword, “Justice” for $200 and then paid .5 per text sent. We sent out one text every day of the conference.
We thought we were geniuses, “oh these youth, they will love to text us and we will capture their data forever” but it was not so simple. Of the 37,000 people there, only 4,100 opted-in to our campaign.
Our problems:
- Too many asks – not only did we want them to text, we wanted them to do a role play about homelessness, write their senator, commit to learning about human trafficking in their community…. we competed with ourselves! Bad bad bad. But somehow we could not stop.
- We asked them to text from our booth in the convention center. People don’t really want to text at a booth. But they will text when they are sitting down watching something. Our best means of getting people to opt in was through when we had workshops where we talked to the youth. Then we said, “take out your phones, “Text Justice to 464329″. And like little happy robots, they did it.
- Sell the message not the tactic. We had two ways of asking them to opt-in. Sometimes we said, if you text, you can be entered to win prizes during the Youth Gathering like a snuggie. Other times we said, if you text you can stay in touch with the ELCA and learn more ways to be involved in our advocacy, hunger and justice work. These were save the world youth! They wanted to stay involved. They were not fooled by snuggies.
- We did not anticipate that these young Christians would have been told to leave their cell phones at home! Yup. Their militant youth leaders set rules: no cell phones. Not sure how to get around that……
- People were more suspicious than we thought they would be, they thought we would spam them. Fair enough. Its a new medium. But we needed some talking points about that.
- Intergration – we did not get fully integrated into the webpage and the other organizers and social media of the gathering. We started too late, and we did not pound the pavement convincing everyone else to get on board. We told ourselves, this is pilot, next time… but ultimately a missed opportunity.
All in all, a good experience, and we will continue to learn from texting this nascent network. Besides, if all 37,000 had texted us it would have broke the bank…. and that would not have been good.
Love this MDG art
July 10, 2009 at 3:12 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: art, Millennium Development Goals
Millennium Development Goal Art in El Salvador, photo by Penny Elsey
Millennium Development Goal art in El Salvador, photo by Penny Elsey
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A more organic approach than the licsense plate with the MDGs I posted about last year.
From a Social Media Anthropologist: Speaking You Tube
July 2, 2009 at 7:06 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentI love this post from Cause Global, an excerpt:
As a professor of introductory anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch says he has a “front row seat” from which to watch new cultural trends emerge from the youngest adult generation, and for the past two-and-a-half years, Wesch has been inviting his students to help him analyze the vast YouTube community.
After trawling through mega-gigs of content, watching hours of videos and posting videos of their own, Wesch says, he and his students “are finding that the same conditions of ease and anonymity that enable people to get snarky online” can also encourage them to participate in meaningful and collaborative new projects. In fact, says Wesch, YouTube and social media can mitigate the cultural tension between teens’ conflicting needs for independence and community by offering them “connection without constraints.” What looks like narcissism and individuality is actually a search for identity and recognition, Wesch told the digerati attending this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan. “In a society that doesn’t automatically grant identity and recognition, you have to create your own.”
Wesch says he’s hopeful that social media will ease the “narcissistic disengagement” of many young people and encourage them to be more politically and civically engaged. Already, he says, some heroes have emerged—including the anonymous YouTube character who filmed himself giving hugs to strangers in the streets, and One World, the person who wore a Guy Fox mask and used his anonymity as a platform for collaboration, asking people to write messages on the palms of their hands and to hold them up to their Webcams for sharing. Millions of people shared this way, mostly about the need to love one another and to look beyond themselves.
“When I’m using a Webcam,” Wesch explains, “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it. When you’re Twittering, you’re not talking to me, you’re talking to it. Or when I’m on Facebook, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it.”
The point, says Wesch: When communicating face-to-face, people bring many different versions of themselves into a conversation based on the context of that conversation. “But when you’re sitting in front of a camera, or twittering to hundreds if not thousands of people in a community who you cannot see and who cannot see you, you don’t know who you are talking to or when or in what context, and so [communication via social media] it is forcing a kind of context collapse—a deeper level of self-awareness not present in simple, everyday conversation. People can get deeply self-reflective on YouTube and confessional…and reveal things they would otherwise refuse to reveal, even to their family and close friends.”
Remembering Thembi, an advocate for youth living with AIDS
June 10, 2009 at 5:21 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: AIDS, NPR, radio, South Africa, Thembi Ngubane, youth
Last year I wrote about meeting Thembi, a young woman living with AIDS in South Africa who streams a radio diary. She died this week.
The journalist who helped her start her radio diary wrote this in remembrance:
Thembi thought about death almost every day. Yet she was the most alive person I’ve ever met. She sometimes asked me why I chose her to do an audio diary about her life. But I feel like she chose me.
Thembi had been struggling off and on with TB. A week ago she learned that she had multi-drug resistant TB. She died Thursday night in the hospital. She was 24.
Thembi gave me, and many of us, a lesson in courage and in embracing the craziness of life – good and bad. She was brave and open about living with AIDS at a time when most South Africans were quiet about the epidemic. She thought the virus should be scared of her, rather than the other way around. She drew pictures of her virus. She talked to it in the mirror. She gave it orders.
Thembi had a short life. But it was a full one by any measure. She had a child. She found a soul mate in her longtime boyfriend, Melikhaya. Her story was heard by millions of people in a dozen countries and five languages. On her tour of the United States, she met Bill Clinton and then-Senator Barak Obama. She traveled to Germany and India as a Unicef ambassador. She was a contestant in an African reality TV show. In South Africa, she became a role model for young people living with HIV. She experienced the hard edges of life in ways that I still find hard to fathom.
I remember when Thembi was invited to address the South African Parliament. “Accept that AIDS is here,” she told the country’s leaders. But life is a mix of cosmic and mundane. The next day, Thembi was back to her normal life: standing in line at the clinic for antiretroviral drugs, caring for her baby, and hoping for a job.
By now, we are all so familiar with the statistics. More than 5000 people die every day from AIDS. Somehow, it never seemed Thembi would be one of them. Thembi embodied great ambition to be heard and seen. She thought it was important to speak out against stigma and discrimination. But she was also motivated by fear: she didn’t want to be anonymous… or forgotten.
Thembi we heard you.
And we miss you.
Edelman’s new SocialCapital widget will help industries lobby, how long will it take nonprofits to catch up?
May 30, 2009 at 8:43 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentEdleman has created a Social Capital Widget. I have been following widget evolution for some time now, and these cute pieces of HTML code have not totally caught on, but I think there is a lot of potential.
How does it work? Say you are filling out email forms to send letters to your legislator on issues like foreign aid spending or Darfur. But you have to click through each form before sending the email. With this widget you can easily see multiple action alerts at once, which makes sending your congressman an email quicker and cleaner. Additionally the widget can live on your desktop, blog or homepage, so you know about new issue votes right when they arise. Check it out:
But, as you see here, the widget has been designed for the Partnership For America’s Energy Security, a group that advocates for more oil drilling in the U.S. They have a lovely website thanks to this top PR firm.
It’s ironic that Edelman has trademarked the words “SocialCapital”, a term which by definition should belong to all of society. According to Robert Putnam, the term refers to the collective value of all ’social networks’, and the beneifts that arise when these networks to do things for each other. This synergy is a key component to building democracy and is currently in decline in America.
Here is my hope: that all the social action groups that have people and environmental concerns at heart, with their low-budget websites and clunky messaging, also use tools like this this widget so it easy for people to take action on legislation that has global benefit.
Meeting Nick Kristof pays off
May 7, 2009 at 4:38 pm | In Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: education, girls, Nick Kristof, Sustainable Health Enterprises
Been celebrating for 2 days now, SHE is featured in Nick Kristof’s blog “Getting Girls in School in Africa”.
Comments are fascinating: why are American women wanting African women to use reuseable pads when they do not use them themselves? Hypocrisy! The beauty is that SHE’s market-based approach will prove that if women want the product, they will buy it, plain and simple.
Well, in one of my many thesis interviews Jene O’keefe Trigg gave me a very good tip about using press coverage like this:
- Ask everyone you know to comment on the article, it will show the journalist its a hot subject
- Analyze the comments for new leads and ideas
- Use some of the comments in your materials to demonstrate need and interest
Please show your love and add your own comment on NYT site.
I finally meet Nick Kristof
May 3, 2009 at 8:28 pm | In Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: Africa, girls, Nick Kristof, strategic communications, women, Women's Funding Network, women's rights
Just wrapped up the Women’s Funding Network conference in Atlanta. One theme I heard throughout was the need for foundations to use strategic communications to tell their stories, influence policy, raise more money etc. Nick Kristof, the conference keynote, summed it up when he said, “the average toothpaste has better messaging than humanitarian organization.” Here, here!
So, I have been waiting for my chance to meet Kristof for years. In his remarks he talked about the most effective interventions for keeping girls in school – things like de-worming medication or sanitary napkins as opposed to building more schools. Well, he said the magic words for SHE, and I had a chance to go up to him afterward and make the pitch: SHE is launching women-led businesses in Africa that keep girls in school by selling low-cost locally made sanitary napkins! He wanted to know how much it costs to keep a girl in school by providing a sanitary napkins – he is all about the best return on investment.
Fine. But then my new favorite woman Yassine Fall from UNIFEM took the mic and told him the reason why girls don’t go to school was that structural adjustment from the IMF has stopped governments from investing in public goods like education and eliminating school fees. Policy is the problem, not as Kristof suggested, men spending less of the family income on alcohol and entertainment and more on education and health. She said his analysis was demonizing African men as irresponsible fathers who only drink beer. The confrontation was an exciting moment in the fancy hotel ballroom.
Well, its too late for Kristof to add Yassine’s perspective in his upcoming book called “Half the Sky” all about women’s rights. He both opened and closed his speech saying: “I truly believe the struggle of the 21st century is a struggle for greater gender equity in the world.” Good messaging — take note women’s funds!
The Youth conference checklist
April 25, 2009 at 6:32 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: Kenya, youth, youth media
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youth march for peace at Kenyan Youth Peace Summit
I am trying as hard to stay in Kenya in my head for as long as possible (going on 5 days now). First thing at hand was working out a nasty computer virus that attacked my laptop. With the youth media team swapping flash drives faster than 17 year-old girls change outfits all the computers stopped working after a few days. A few working methods I plan to take with me to what I hope will be many more youth peace summits in Africa:
- wear the flash drive around my neck so I don’t lose it, and bring 5 to share
- upload any important files to an internet site in case flash drive goes missing
- travel with anti-virus software and learn how it works in extreme rescue situations
- travel with sound cables to hook up the laptop to anything with speakers
- disallow workshop presenters from using powerpoint because 1) they don’t use it correctly and only put up their talking notes 2) for goodness sakes this is a youth conference 3) I need to use my stressed out moments for human-related problems
- when an American wants to come, I will say yes only if they have IT skills including the ability to take a projector apart and put it back together in 20 minutes
- when an American wants to come, they must first pass a comprehensive ”go with the flow” test (sorry type A’s).
- must have on hand “the Kenyan big sister” – she deals with women issues including counseling and telling any women acting up to get it together, and likewise “the Kenyan big brother” to keep the boys in line. (obviously nationality to change in case of conference)
- as lovely as a youth videography team is, if we want this thing captured properly we need a professional
- build in hours of flexible time into the schedule so we can adjust as chaos demands
- fight like hell to have time before and after the conference in country to do follow-up and prep.
SHE – Sustainable Health Enterprises- This is why we do what we do October 30, 2009
- Africa is Rich! October 13, 2009
- Rising Voices
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