Recently, a charity called Living Streets dedicated to making cities more pedestrian-friendly, wrapped London’s Brick Lane lamp posts in football-esque bumpers to protect texting pedestrians from injury. Though the publicity stunt lasted a mere 24 hours, the effort highlighted what most of us already know: that people are addicted to being connected, even while walking.

A recent study by PEW found that more than roughly 6 in 10 American cell phone users text message. It’s no wonder that everyone from Presidential campaigns to police officers to WalMart to nonprofit causes (highlighted by MobileActive.org) seek to leverage the popularity of text messaging.

1. The mobile audience is wide and deep: Worldwide, more people have access to and use of mobile phones than the Internet. As Ethan Zuckerman of TechSoup points out, “The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio.” Given the penetration, personalization and simplicity of mobile devices, there is no better tool to reach both wealthy individuals and underserved populations. In addition, you can activate young, tech savvy people using the communications channel that makes the most sense to them.
2. Simple is superior: I may be biased given my blog style is list format, but people like byte-sized – and actionable – information. In an information economy, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the breadth of accessible knowledge. Communicating with individuals via the limited 160 characters in a text message requires the messenger to cut the window dressing and deliver messages that are simple, clear and clever to make an impact. To educate and motivate, it’s all about the words themselves (which is great since haikus are so cool).
3. Reach people where and when they matter: All politics are local and all advocacy is timely. When someone is checking email at 10pm after a long day of work, sending a letter to an elected official may be overdue. With text messaging, you can give people a specific address of a place to be, a direct action to take or short talking points while they are in a meeting or at an event so they can act on it when it actually matters. However, this means the action must be real and serious not just a faux-urgent engagement effort. The technique also allows you to reach people when their emotional senses are heightened before they lose their enthusiasm (or anger) about an issue.
4. Penetrate the “Circle of Trust”: While studies show that people will offer up their email address for almost anything, cell phone numbers remain relatively protected, both by the individual and the mobile service providers. Therefore, if your supporters give you their cell to reach them on their most personal device, you can assume you’re in the circle of trust and that your message will be read. The key is to maintain that level of trust through infrequent, authentic and relevant subsequent messages. Mobile communications elevates the level of accountability for all campaigns and requires listening to what supporters want.
5. Another spoke on the wheel of integration: Continuing to blur the lines of offline and online, text messaging allows marketers to both capture and measure the success of offline events and print advertising like never before. Supporters can text from an ad they’ve seen or post on a website a photo or podcast they record from an event. A mobile strategy is another tool to use in conjunction with traditional advertising and media, online marketing and in-person events but should not just replicate what’s being said through other channels.
6. Experimentation is expected: Because it’s still a relatively new channel, text messaging campaigns leave a lot of room for trial and error and users expect it. Advocacy organizations and corporations alike can promote their “products” in innovative ways that push the interactive brand experience envelope. Successful campaigns will think about marketing as two-way conversation and not just another medium to push an agenda.

Editor’s  note: Each week, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. With NTC next week, many of our readers will be browsing from mobile devices like phones and blackberries. So this week, we asked the Beaconfire staff: What website do you most wish had a mobile version?

Jeff, Principal Consultant: Most of the staff already know and ridicule my ability to check the metro “next train” information from my phone. This simple WAP enabled application on the WMATA metro site is by far the most useful mobile site I use.

Other must haves include fantasy football sites where you can check the score of your matchup while at the game or at your favorite watering hole without dragging around your computer.

Lastly, there is a mobile site for zipcar, my other must have transportation option. However this app is less necessary since the easiest way to access when not in front of a computer is through the automated phone system. Sweet.

Milo, Marketing Consultant: Central Desktop.  Bringing their online project management software to the next level of seamlessness will require making their tools more accessible on mobile browsers.  As of now, it’s not even possible for users to login from Blazer (the mobile browser I currently use).  

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: LogMeIn, or other remote desktop apps. I sometimes need more power than I could get from my iPod or phone, and would like to be able to enlist my desktop to help out.

I’d also like to see blogging software use a mobile version; updating Wordpress from an iPod was painful.

Taylor, Software Engineer: Google, particularly the maps and yellow pages. If I can look up locations, I can generally get the other information I need.

Kristin, Project Manager: I’d say sites that I need to access when I’m out and about. Like mapquest or google maps when I’m driving around and lost. Or like Jeff said, the metro arrival/departure info.

David, Software Engineer: Restaurant finders and gas station finders.

Eric, Senior Consultant: I’d like to see a good mobile feedreader. Email as well, of course; I find that Yahoo mail is barely passable. If I was going to tinker with my phone, though I think of it not as much as a substitute for the internet, instead I wish that there was better hardware. A better camera and a camcorder, as well as the applications to blog mobile. I’d like to see a way to upload video to Wordpress.

With the mobile revolution, web design firms like Beaconfire are paying more and more attention to making sites look good on mobile devices. Make sure you check back for more on this, and keep reading the Beaconfire Wire on your mobile device next week as we blog from NTC.

I do not own a Blackberry or an iPhone, but I still dish out a fair sum of money every month for my cell phone service and I would not say the device itself was too cheap either. So, is it too much to ask for a decent interface on my phone? The Open Handset Alliance does not think so.

According to them, it is estimated that there are close to 1.5 billion televisions in this world, and 1 billion people using the internet. Still the most successful consumer product is clearly the mobile phone with around 3 billion users [Source]. So why aren�??t cell phones easier to navigate and customize to our needs, the way our computer operating systems are?

Google and others have come up with a way to change all this. Follow me below the fold for more�?�

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Remember the Verizon ads that have phone users wandering around town, with the whole network of Verizon users following them around? I always thought those were a little creepy – do I really want The Network listening in on my phone calls?

Turns out those people aren’t just following you around, they’re also checking your text messages to determine what they think is appropriate and what’s not. And today, as the New York Times noted, they decided that a perfectly innocuous advocacy message wasn’t appropriate. From the piece,

Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

Was this Verizon dipping their toe into the water of a politically censored network to see what kind of message it would send? Was it an overzealous spam filter that got its signals crossed? Was it an antiquated policy that should be dropped? Or was it just a dumb call? Follow me below the break for more, and what it could mean for your NPO.

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How is it that a nation that was first to the moon, first to create artificial light, and first to deep-fry cotton candy is one of the only nations without a good SMS payment system. That is, a system that’s good for consumers, small businesses and non-profits, rather than a cash cow for telecommunications companies (which I suppose answers my question). But as Duncan on TechCrunch discusses, it looks like that may be coming to an end as Google’s patent for GPay reveals that they’ve been pondering a way to pay by phone.

I’ve written previously about the unfeasibility of running fundraising campaigns by SMS in America. Google’s GPay patent application reveals possible plans for a system that would allow people to buy things or pay each other by SMS. Via the Times of London:

The new patent, which was filed last year by Google but has only just been published, describes how a text message from a mobile phone could trigger a �??computer-implemented method of effectuating an electronic online payment�?�.

While mobile phone-based payment systems already exist, some commentators suggested that the development of such a service could give Google a lift as it makes a big push into telecoms.

[...]

The GPay patent filing describes a system where a user sends a text message to Google that gives details of a payment to a specified payee. GPay would debit the user�??s bank account and credit the payee. It suggests that a user would not have to keep an account with Gpay as payments would be made externally.

Taking payments out of the hands of telecoms would likely mean dramatically lower fees, which opens the door to SMS fundraising. What could this mean? Sure, there’s that initial vision of Bono at a conference, urging fans to txt $10 to ONE to end poverty. But there’s so much more that organizations can do, even if they don’t have rock-star power behind them. Here are a couple ideas off the top of my head:

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A article in the Times caught my eye earlier this week – it purported that HP had developed an easy way to print using a mobile phone. The idea intrigued me – I’m always on the lookout for cool SMS tools (there’s got to be more to it than poorly spelled messages filled with “ur” and other expressions used to save people the agony of typing two more characters… but I digress) and being without a printer on the road can be a nuisance – having to transcribe Google Maps directions by hand sort of defeats the point.

So I read the article and was disappointed to see that it’s not so much printing from a mobile phone as using a mobile phone as one of several devices in the process of getting something to print, sort of like saying you walk to work because there’s a parking lot between your house and your car. Here’s how it works:

The service requires users to first �??print�?� their documents to H.P. servers connected to the Internet. The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.

Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user�??s cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user�??s phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint Web site. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.

The service will include a directory service that will show the location of publicly available printers on Google Maps. The system currently works with any Windows-connected printer. A Macintosh version is also planned.

Make sense? It’s all the fun of using Kinko’s web upload service combined with the hassle of saving every text message that relates to a document you might one day need. But I decided to put my skepticism aside and give it a try – maybe the Times was just making it sound convoluted.

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Every national election since the internet became relatively universal seems to bring with it a new "killer app" for politicos – it’s often something that connects the online and the offline, or something that helps campaigns do do something they already did in a whole new way. In 2004, it was the blog, in 2006, it was YouTube, and with 2008 looming, several technologies emerge for what could be the next killer app. Will it be social networks, with MySpace’s broad utilization and Facebook’s ability to leverage existing networks, and candidates own social networks, which let them integrate fundraising and list-building tools right into the interface (and keep their message from appearing alongside those annoying "<verb> the <noun> and win a free ringtone" ads)? Will it be Twitter, letting people alert their networks of apolitical friends when they’re going to vote? Maybe aggressive and innovative search engine marketing techniques to match paid search links with hot issues?

Two campaigns are betting that it might be SMS, which has been around since 1992, but which has finally achieved widespread use in recent years. Even if it’s not this cycle’s killer app, SMS will still have a role to play, and the Edwards and Obama campaigns have been experimenting with the technology in ways NPOs can emulate with their own members.

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