Mobile activism, Part 2

Unfortunately I missed most of Jonathan Donner’s presentation at the workshop this morning on Innovations in Social Marketing, at the MobileActive08 conference. I did catch the last couple of minutes though, when he spoke of the use of missed calls in India, as a means of disseminating information. Eg: a number is offered, for people to beep, or give a missed call. They then get called back, and offered the information they need.

Gustav Praekelt and Robin Miller of the Praekelt Foundation then presented their project called Socialtxt. This makes use of the ‘please call me’ message that cellphone users frequently send. This message arrives as an SMS on recipients phones, while the sender gets a confirmation message. It is possible to attach marketing messages to these SMSs, and this is done frequently for commercial purposes. With Socialtxt, based on an open-source platform, instead of commercial messages, social marketing messages are used.

In South Africa, around 30 million ‘please call me’ messages are sent every day — this has the potential for enormous reach, at low cost.

In one of their case studies, the project implementers set out to answer the question:  “Can we get people to call in to the national hIV/Aids helpline?” The project operated for 5 weeks and they sent out 1 million messages a day. The result was a total of 20 million branded messages sent out, reaching 4 million unique people (it’s possible for each individual to send up to 7 please call messages a day). As a result, 45 000 people responded by calling the national HIV/AIDS helpline (and a by-product of this was that the project also ended up with a database of 45 000 telephone numbers).

This represented a 136% increase in call volumes for the HIV/Aids helpline — 1500 additional calls a day. Even after the messages stopped, people would keep them on their phones and refer to them. 98% of all callers were referred by Socialtxt.

One of the lessons learnt was the need to be prepared — organisations looking to replicate this need to ensure they can handle the huge call volumes. Also, if one operates a toll-free call centre, one’s costs double if call volumes double.

There are many ongoing questions: Howto  deal with capacity constraints?
How best to utilise these channels? What’s the business model? (can one combine social marketing with commercial business models to make it sustainable?).

Aside from the Socialtxt model there are many cellphone based social marketing options that one can consider, depending on options such as cost, penetration, and level of interactivity. Examples are bulk SMS, ringtones with messages, answer tones, WAP applications, wallpapers, and so on.

Some other things that came out of the session:

There is hIgh and increasing penetration of cell phones in the developing world. Eg SA: 48 million people, 37 milion have cell phones.

When considering campaigns and options one needs research:

* what’s the reach of the platform: real penetration numbers?
*  cost to the user?
*  ease of use
*  how many handsets support the technology?
*  is it standards based?
*  cost to reach audience?
* relevance to audience

There was some discussion of the value of using incentives to get people to call or take specific action — eg the possibility of winning some airtime. In commercial campaigns incentives dramatically increase response levels — but are they appropriate in social marketing? For example, would you get hoax callers dialing the HIV/AIDS helpline, just to win the prize?

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Brenda Burrell’s mini talk on Mobile and Radio for Independent Media presented a project called Freedom Fone. This is a project in Zimbabwe, run by the Kubatana Trust.

It involves providing radio-like audio content via interactive menu response by use of phones. Users can call up the service, and choose from a menu, to access audio items they with to listen to: news headlines, a feature, music and inspirational messages and so on.

The idea came from the use of interactive phone menus by commercial companies.
When she learnt about how interactive menus are used, Burrell thought, “Why don’t we get more creative with how we use that kind of interface?” She coined the phrase, ‘dialup-radio.’  “It’s not really radio she says — its how you put information together and make use of it.”

The idea seemed suited to Zimbabwe, where there is a lack of independent media, and broadcast media in particular — but where there is a large mobile phone user base.

There are two sides to the project, says Burrell:  building compelling audio materials, and making it accessible. WIth a large grant from the Knight Foundation, Kubatana will be working on both over the next 2 years. They also want to assist other organisations to learn to do this. They would also be interested in helping roll out the model to other countries.

One of the issues is cost to the user. This can be resolved by providing toll free numbers, or ‘tickle’ numbers — where you dial a number, hang up, and you get a call back.

The system operates with a telephony server and a couple of other pieces of equipment that is all very portable — it all fits into a medium size tote bag.

For more information email info@freedomfone.org

Mobile activism, part 1

I’ve just been wandering around the SIMLab and SIMPlace at the MobileActive 08 conference. Talk about information overload! It helps to focus on specific themes, and try to get a picture of what is happening in particular fields or areas of interest. One strong theme in the displays is the use of cell phones for field research. There are a number of systems and services on display.

Easy Capture offers options for data capture where field researchers use smart phones to collect data and transfer it to a central server. There it can be displayed directly in various formats such Excel and SPSS. Likewise, Mobile Researcher enables surveys to be conducted via standard cell phones, using simple-to-use questionnaires. Completed questionnaires are uploaded to the central server. Once uploaded the completed surveys are removed from the cell phone. This is done to ensure the confidentiality of respondents.

The Citizen Journalism in Africa participants at the conference are working with Mobile Researcher to conduct snap surveys of MobileActive08 participants. It really is simple to use: our team got the training in about 20 minutes and were all set. The results are displayed immediately in a mash-up map in the main foyer. So, for example, one can get an immediate picture of the various countries that delegates come from.

Research options on display at the conference range from very simple and straightforward — survey forms involving radio buttons and simple numerical and short text responses, to more complicated options allowing such things as integration and transfer of audio recordings and photographs of respondees.

Later this afternoon at MobileActive08 I attended ‘The Mobile Web’: The potential and reality for developing countries, facilitated by Toni Eliasz.

There was extended discussion of the value of the mobile web to developing countries. Views hinge a lot on how one defines ‘mobile web’. Some people had strong reservations about the potential of the mobile web, related to affordability, the need for high-end phones in order to browse the internet, the high cost of data access via cellphone networks, and ongoing problems with connectivity.

But many of these reservations can be removed if one defines the mobile web more broadly than accessing the Internet. One person proposed defining it as access to data and databases in whatever form. So if people are able to access data on the Internet, through tailored SMS services, for example, that qualifies as the mobile web.

Cost is not necessarily always high, some participants argued. One person pointed to MXIT – a South African-developed chat service used widely by teens. The cost of using it is minimal. Another pointed to widespread use of Google and social networking sites like Facebook among the youth, using cellphones.

The discussion also looked at the suitability and accessibility of present content on the web (some felt much current content is not really directed at the needs and capacities of people in the developing world — eg places with low literacy levels). On the other hand, the development of the mobile web could help people leapfrog into higher levels of computer – and Internet – literacy, and could also allow people in developing nations to develop their own content.

Mobile internet is not ‘the internet on the mobile’, said one participant. The nature of sites, and the kind of data accessed are different. The same person warned that as with the Internet, the mobile web, will be flooded with commercially-based sites and commercial information. We need to ensure that the important social and educational and developmental content gets attention. NGOs need to ensure that their sites are tailored for mobile use, or else they will lose out.

The session was more about questions than answers: is there a need for specialised applications? How do we scale up projects and initiatives? How do we get people to develop suitable applications? Is SMS the thing to focus on for the near future, or should we be looking at WAP applications?

Mobile banking was another big topic of discussion. Aside from the example of M-Pesa in Kenya, there is a great need for applications and services allowing not only mobile banking, but payments and transfers via mobile phones.

One problem is the amount of profit that cell phone companies take, for mobile-based payments — sometimes around 30-40% of the product cost. This is limits the viability of business models. Even charity appeals and services lose a huge percentage of mobile-based income in this way.