Mobile Commons

Recently, we had a chance to chat with Jim Manis, the Chairman and CEO of the Mobile Giving Foundation.  Mobile Commons has been working with the Mobile Giving Foundation (MGF) to bring mobile donations to our 501(c)3 customers. Mobile Fundraising is new, and has tremendous potential to change the way that microdonations are collected and we’re excited to share the following interview with Jim Manis, the man who made it happen.

Jim, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to start the Mobile Giving Foundation?

Sure, my background is inclusive of being a co-founder of a company called m-Qube. We were one of the first to develop the direct to consumer mobile content market in North America. We really helped pioneer the notion that it’s all about consumer control where the consumer—not the carrier—is deciding what they want, where, when and how they access information, content and entertainment. m-Qube was sold to VeriSign a few years ago who in turn has been a significant contributor to the Mobile Giving Foundation.

I have also been very active across the wireless industry, including serving as the Global Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association from 2003 to 2006. We worked with application providers, media companies, ad agencies, content providers and the wireless carriers to establish standards for mobile application behavior and consumer protection.

While at m-Qube, I led an effort in partnership with the US wireless carriers and the CTIA, when both Katrina and the Asian Pacific Tsunami occurred to enable emergency relief donations with a 100% pass through using a premium SMS transaction on your mobile device. People’s response to the relief donations was amazing and underscored an empowerment that came with the ability for people to respond immediately – or by impulse – to such an overwhelming need. After m-Qube was acquired by VeriSign, I wanted to take what we’d done for those special events and make it available for all charitable organizations as part of my commitment to give back.

And what did you see as the main barrier to opening up mobile fundraising?

Well, what was missing was the operational layer between carriers and nonprofit organizations so that both parties could have confidence in the system and that the process itself enabled an acceptable rate of pass through to the recipient foundation. We also wanted to do it in such a way that donors and potential donors saw their phone as a viable and trusted way to make micro-donations. The Mobile Giving Foundation, as a 501(c)3, provides this operational layer.

Can you speak a little more about the operational layer and what that entails?

The operational layer facilitates the ability for nonprofits to interact with their donors through the mobile channel, regardless of what phone service donors use. The MGF provides the technical connectivity layer and the business agreements that transmit messages and billing events, and frames the standards and best practices by which money can be raised where a billing event occurs on the carrier bill. The Mobile Giving Foundation extends this operational layer to a broader ecosystem that includes application providers like you [Mobile Commons], the wireless carriers, and the nonprofit organizations. Fundamentally, it’s a way for nonprofits to reach their donors. Those donors are also customers of the wireless carriers.

We also make sure that all federal and state laws are complied with and donors get receipted. A big part of the operational responsibility is message delivery and the billing that allows the donor to make a $5 or $10 contribution that appears on the carrier phone bill. That donation gets remitted to the Mobile Giving Foundation and then we settle with the partner charity. When you look at the billing process and the messaging systems of each carrier, they’re very different. When you look at it from an operational perspective, we remove those complexities for nonprofits and application providers. We then provide a receipt to the donor for their contribution.

Why did you use the term micro-donations?

By definition, it’s a micro-donation because of the price point ($5 and $10) and means of conveyance on the carrier bill. When you start something new, it’s important to keep it simple. The Mobile Giving Foundation elected to go with a price point that is acceptable to all wireless carriers and try to keep some commonality around those price points as new giving programs go to market. As consumers become more educated, they’ll realize this is a mechanism to make donations and as those consumers become more comfortable, you’ll see more innovation around price points—but, there will always be a cap. This is one of many cost elements that show up on a consumer’s carrier bill.

Why did you decide to make the Mobile Giving Foundation a nonprofit?

There are several reasons. First, my goal is to help the wireless industry apply resources that support worthy causes. Second, I want to help establish a new level of efficiency using wireless resources and try to keep the overhead costs to nonprofits at 10% or less than the amount they raise using the channel. Third, I want this channel to be trusted by donors, charities and carriers. It seemed to me like the best way to provide end-to-end protection and accomplish these goals was to make the Mobile Giving Foundation a 501(c)3 with the MGF serving as an umbrella for the donation, collection, remittance and advisement process.

Can you speak to the direct responsibilities of the Mobile Giving Foundation in the approval process for fundraising programs?

The MGF certifies that a nonprofit meets the established criteria for mobile giving, and reviews and approves that a specific mobile giving campaign meets our standards and those established by other industry organizations such as the MMA. The processes used to create these standards and criteria include representatives from interests across the spectrum. It is important to us that the MGF helps ensure the integrity of mobile giving by focusing on clarity to donors when they are asked to give and transparency for donors when a gift has been made.

What’s the timing like in the approval process?

For the foreseeable future, it’s a manual process with heavy overhead. We are working within a system and with processes developed to support commercial premium transactions. NPO qualifications, campaign approvals, short code provisioning, billing system updates, application testing all currently translate to approximately an 8 week time frame. This will eventually get shorter as our own capabilities improve and our processes are streamlined.

Any Closing Thoughts?

I’m very pleased that we can make available a whole new fundraising channel to nonprofits, and just as importantly, help provide a channel for a new, younger demographic to explore, learn and give to causes of interest to them. I’m particularly delighted that the wireless carriers see the value of supporting this effort, and doing so on a no cost basis. They have been generous in helping pioneer this new channel. Of course, we love the fact that companies like Mobile Commons and others have stepped up and leveraged their technology in the giving space. Our collective efforts will literally help change to face of giving today.

There’s been good coverage of Obama’s Vice Presidential announcement all over the web (particularly GigaOM and the NY Times). While there has been some grumbling about the announcement coming a little late because CNN got the scoop, overall the Obama campaign is being lauded for their marketing savvy. At Mobile Commons, we think they are not being lauded highly enough for what they managed to pull off. Here’s why: the Obama campaign may have just pulled off the most cost-effective Get Out the Vote (GOTV) program in history!

In 2006, Mobile Commons’ platform was used in a study conducted by the New Voter’s Project, Princeton, and the University of Michigan. The results of the study were a wonderful surprise to us. In the table below, you can see cost per vote compared between various media:

Elections pivot on turnout and voter engagement. The main conclusion to be drawn from the table above: the more personal the communication, the more effective. The most personal form of communication, face to face interaction, has the highest mobilization effect. Text messaging is something mainly done with friends and—terse as it is—highly personal. For campaigns, mobile messaging provides one the most cost effective ways of engaging constituents with highly personal and interactive messaging. The Obama Campaign realized this and constructed the VP announcement to help them build critical mass with their mobile list.

Most elections are won by narrow margins and the game is finding the right population to help you swing the election. Mobile messaging has shown its ability to activate large numbers of people and populations that are often unreachable. The Obama Campaign has shown great ability to reach and excite younger voters. If you’ve ever watched young people text message, you know the possibilities for engagement and interaction are very high. Although all ages send mobile messages, the Obama Campaign may be aiming at the youth vote as its swing contingent.

What the Obama Campaign has done is secure a massive Get Out the Vote list that will be a more cost effective solution than anything else. Thus far, I’ve received a few broadcast messages and requests for my zipcode, which they’ve already collected. I’m anticipating locally targeted messages. The unknown is if the Obama Campaign will use their enlarged mobile list to also reach out more personally for increased voter engagement. As more and more campaigns embrace mobile, it will be thrilling to see the effect of even more personal correspondence and conversation that really take advantage of the usage patterns of mobile messaging.

Someone gets it right.

There has been a lot of excitement about mobile giving over the past few months. In the coming weeks, we will be launching mobile giving campaigns with existing customers of the Mobile Commons platform. Over the next year our customers and users of other platforms will be launching many more. Our focus is going to be on integrated data and reporting with existing fundraising tools tying giving into more participatory calls to action.Here are a few points that will shed some light on how mobile giving works:

• What changed? Before the advent of the Mobile Giving Foundation (the MGF) the carriers took a fee of approximately 50% of all money charged to a customers phone bill. The MGF was formed to provide approved 501(c)3 organizations the ability to raise money and have carriers waive the fee. The major carriers and the MGF have agreed to allow the MGF to administer the approval process for selecting qualified 501(c)3’s.
• How does it work? Every 501(c)3 organization that wants to do a mobile fundraising campaign must directly enter into an agreement with MGF that must be approved by both MGF and the major carriers.
• Why do I need Mobile Commons? You don’t. You do, however, need a mobile application service provider (MASP), of which we are one. There are currently five service providers approved by the MGF.
• Does it matter which service provider I use? From the perspective of carrier and MGF approval, no service provider has an advantage over another. And currently no service providers have their profile data or applications integrated with the Mobile Giving Foundation. All giving programs are run directly from the MGF application. Over time, tighter technical integration will be possible and Mobile Commons will provide a total mobile solution for advocacy and fundraising.
• How much does it cost? The MGF charges between 5% and 10% of the total amount raised. On top of that each application service provider charges a fee. Mobile Commons fees are available on request. The other MASP’s charge in other ways.
• How can I learn more? Click here for more information such as use cases or contact us at info {at} mcommons(.)com.

We’re thrilled to announce that Matt Wilson has joined Mobile Commons as our Director of Partnerships. Matt comes to us from Convio, a CRM powerhouse in the nonprofit sector, where he brought us in as their mobile partner. We’ve worked with Matt closely over the past year and are excited for all the great experience and enthusiasm he’s bringing with him (in addition to his time at Convio, Matt’s worked on five Presidential campaigns and one race for DNC chair). Matt’s also going to be opening our San Francisco office.

From Matt himself:

Nearly 18 months ago, I set out to learn more about how Convio could deliver services to our clients in the exploding mobile space. After a ton of research and evaluation, I was thrilled to form Convio’s mobile partnership with Mobile Commons. Throughout the entire project, the Mobile Commons team and product continued to impress me. And when they asked me to join them, I couldn’t say no.

What was so interesting to me? Mobile applications felt much more like having a conversation with an organization rather than a broadcast from them, something that is paramount to interactivity and capturing a constituent’s attention. 60-80% percent response rates and 99% open rates are just plain more fun when it is time for testing and benchmarking.

The most alluring mobile opportunities, however, are the things we haven’t done yet. What are some location-based applications that would be useful to an activist organization? How will iPhone Apps or Google’s Android OS affect nonprofits? How can we help nonprofits raise money with mobile? Will voice calls to Congress, driven by text messages, change our legislative process?

Here is a little about me:

I love politics and technology. Prior to joining Mobile Commons, I built partner programs at Convio and GetActive Software that introduced innovative technologies into Convio’s product suite and brought leading consulting firms devoted to political and nonprofit online strategy into the companies’ communities.

Building partnerships with other cool technologies and introducing our mobile suite to nonprofit marketing agencies will be my main focus here at Mobile Commons, and I am really excited to continue working in this vibrant nonprofit technology community.

If you want to learn more about becoming a Mobile Commons Partner, please shoot me an email at matt {at} mcommons(.)com or give me a buzz at 415.699.4474.

Cheers!
Matt

Recently, we released a new and improved version of our mData Service. Simply: mData is the easiest way to share searchable information on every mobile phone. You can power mData by uploading a simple spreadsheet or by tying it into an existing web service. Users can then perform queries on that database by sending simple SMS messages with query parameters.

Watch a short, 3-minute screencast on the new mData.

In our new release, we focused on improving the reporting and making it easy for our customers to contextualize the results from their users and constituents. Search is a powerful tool and the data from search queries helps our customers learn a lot about their constituency’s priorities.

For example, if an organization only publishes static web pages, wallet cards, or PDF files, they’ll never learn which information their audience responds to—users will only get static information. Using mData, queries can be compared against each other.

The other thing we realized is that people are used to querying the entire web, where there is plenty of information, though much of it isn’t very good. By contrast, many of our customers are established and trusted sources of information and giving them a way to publish and easily maintain their own search benefits consumers and them. However, one of the tough things about maintaining a searchable database is telling people that you don’t have any results for their search. With our new mData, we’re ranking the top missed queries for our customers and contextualizing them so that they have a roadmap for doing new research and adding new results to their database, creating increasingly better resources for their audiences.

The new mData is a big step forward in taking the research of an organization and turning it into an easily maintainable consumer utility. It’s easy to use for organizations, easy to use for consumers—and with the new release, the quality of information will only get better with time.

CREDO Mobile, using technology from Mobile Commons Paul Notzold and artwork by Tom Tomorrow, won a Cannes’ Cyber Lion for an amazing campaign in San Francisco. The campaign featured projections on the sides of buildings around the city with people interacting with them and changing them by text message.

Agencies involved: ss+k, neverstop

The Personal Democracy Forum is the leading event where professionals in the technology and political worlds interact in a meaningful way. The attendees are high level from campaigns and organizations. The speakers are first rate luminaries in their fields. Everyone interested in the intersection of technology and civic life should attend.

If you do attend please come to the panel: Mobile Politics: How to Unblock the Future which will include Becky Bond from Credo Mobile, Scott Goodstein from the Obama campaign, Catherine Geanuracos from Live Earth and me.

Credo Mobile has done some of the most innovative and effective mobile Get out the Vote programs. The Obama campaign has integrated mobile into their media strategy better than anyone else. I will be discussing various ways campaigns and organizations are using mobile as well as the policy issues that effect mobile innovation.

Michael Bassik of MSHC Partners has been a pioneer in the use of mobile with his clients, notably the Human Rights Campaign. He’s been using Mobile Commons’ software to win Pollie Awards and is the recipient of this year’s Big Idea Chair Award from Yahoo! Recently, we had a brief conversation with Michael asking him about some of the highlights he’s had using Mobile Commons to build lists and achieve superlative response rates.

Q: Just to get started, how long have you been using mobile technology with your clients?

Michael Bassik: We began experimenting with mobile in 2005. We teamed up with a handful of local candidates to test the use of text messages to register voters in urban neighborhoods and university campuses. We recognized early on that mobile technology would one day have a tremendous impact on the electorate.

And what prompted you to make the jump and try mobile in the first place?

MB: Without sounding cheesy, we really believe in innovation. MSHC was the nation’s first microtargeting firm serving Democratic candidates and progressive causes. And in 2004, MSHC Partners became the first traditional political communications firm to open an interactive marketing practice. When we saw commercial marketers embracing mobile, we knew we had to try it out.

When you’re working with your clients on their media strategy, what are the best indicators that a mobile component would be a good fit?

MB: A strong, loyal activist base is a must. You bring your phone into bed with you. It’s with you in the bathroom. You take it on your vacations. As such, those signing up for mobile alerts are likely to be your most ardent supporters. You don’t need a ton of people to have a successful mobile program, but you most certainly need an enthusiastic following.

Second, there has to be a need for immediate or on-the-go communication. If your organization is dependent on happenings in the news cycle, mobile is likely a good solution. Or if your supporters aren’t the type to be in front of their computers all day, we’d consider mobile ahead of other interactive strategies.

Any great mobile success stories?

MB: We helped prove that text messages before Election Day can increase voter turnout. The power of this new medium to increase civic participation is really thrilling.

Ed. Note: Michael is talking about a study done by New Voters Project, Working Assets (now CREDO Wireless), University of Michigan, and Princeton to measure the cost of getting out the vote. SMS alerts proved the most cost effective.

Mobile Commons and Convio just completed a data-sharing integration, you were one of the first to take advantage of it with your client, HRC. Has the integration made a difference in your mobile programs and list size?

MB: Database integration between mCommons and Convio has given a tremendous boost to the HRC Mobile Action Network. We literally doubled the size of our list in under a month.

What about using mobile with other media such as outdoor advertising, print, and live events? What are some of the benefits?

MB: The best ways to generate mobile subscribers are with sign-up sheets at live events and on your organization’s website. Outdoor advertising, print advertising and announcements at live events have proven fairly ineffective acquisition tools.

But we expect this will soon change. As more and more people know what to do when we tell them to “Text HRC to 30644,” the more we expect live event announcements and advertisements to help drive sign-ups.

Other than sending out alerts, what other kinds of other mobile programs have you done with your clients?

MB: I think we’ve tried it all. We’ve sent alerts, petitions, patch-through calls, coupons and fundraising appeals. We even worked with mCommons to project incoming text messages on the screen at U2 concerns.

As a consultant, what are some of the benefits of using an on-demand software platform like Mobile Commons?

MB: The platform is very easy to use. The ability to send breaking news alerts in a matter of seconds sets it apart from any other mobile platform we’ve tried.

Any closing thoughts on mobile?

MB: We’re starting to see organizations use mobile to communicate with supporters during natural disasters. And we’re seeing candidates using their cell phones to send updates while on the road. The non-profit and political arenas have yet to experience a breakthrough mobile moment, but we know it’s coming soon and we’re happy to be along for the ride.

People want what they need when they need it. It’s as simple as that.

Often that need is specific helpful, information to allow people to make choices. Parents confront these choices every day, and for the past few years, they’ve been turning to a trustworthy blog - Z Recommends - for help. And while Z Recommends has had the information parents need, they haven’t always been able to provide that information when and where parents needed it - until now.

Parents are major consumers of plastic baby bottles, which are made by a multitude of manufacturers and sold by even more retailers. Now parents are being told that these bottles might contain a carcinogenic substance called BPA. The bottles with BPA are not labeled. Parents need to know when they buy the bottle if it contains BPA.

Z Recommends has ingeniously used our mData application to make that information available to everyone by SMS. All anyone needs to do is text - ZRECS and the brand name of the bottle - to the short code 69866 and instantly learn whether a bottle is safe for a baby. All Z Recommends needed to do was upload a spreadsheet into the mData application and they were good to go in seconds.

What you need, when you need it. It’s as simple as that.