Cultivating tangible change
Mobile Phones
Mobile phones are the most pervasive communications tool in the world. This alone makes them an excellent communications medium for organizations to use to reach out supporters, but actually doing so isn’t as easy or affordable as it should be. We’re working to change that.
We mentored our own Will White in a Google Summer of Code project meant to create a framework to better integrate sms and Drupal. What started off as a rather basic project exploded into a robust toolset that will truly lower the barriers to using sms in outreach efforts and integrating it into Drupal websites.
We’ve run sms outreach campaigns in the past, including one by Planned Parenthood during the November 2006 election. In this campaign Planned Parenthood sent supporters text message updates on the status of South Dakota’s vote on the statewide blanket ban on abortions. News on the vote reached supporters before it hit the airwaves and gave them value-added content on a crucial vote.
We’ve also experimented with using ringtones as a social tool. After the appalling response to Hurricane Katrina, we created the “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” ringtone to let people voice their displeasure with the administration’s response every time their phone rang.
One of our passions is testing out new ideas, and we especially like ones that involve mobile phones. We share all of our success with the MobileActive community and other progressive groups.
Used By
Strategy Focus
SMS Framework + Notifications and Messaging Modules = Wicked Simple SMS Notifications in Drupal
New Notification Feature for the SMS Framework
New Notification Feature for the SMS Framework
The SMS Framework project has gathered a great amount of support from the developer community. Tylor at Raincity Studios has been doing some great work with fixing up the SMS Framework project, so I thought it would be good to return to my roots to upgrade the framework and contribute an important feature. We're moving toward a 1.0 release for 5.x and ultimately upgrading to Drupal 6, so stay tuned for that.
As I've been moving down the issue queue reviewing and applying patches, one feature stood out to me - the need to store users' mobile numbers in a separate table, instead of in $user->data. This will allow Drupal to identify the author of incoming SMS messages. With this feature, your visitors will be able to get updates about various events that occur on your site. For example, they can be alerted when new comments are made on their posts or when a 'event' node type is created. The patch includes a restructured interface for adding and confirming your mobile number. It's very similar to Twitter and Brightkite :) The Messaging Framework makes use of the API to support SMS as a send method. Add Notifications and you'll be able to alert users about updated content via SMS. I wanted to quickly show everyone how easy this is to set up.
1. Download the SMS Framework, the Messaging Framework, and the Notifications module and place them in your modules directory. (Also get Token as Notifications depends on it.)
2. Turn on the following modules:
- Messaging Framework
- SMS Messaging
- Content Notifications
- Notifications
- Notifications UI
- Token
- Email Gateway (We'll be using this for the example, but any gateway module should work.)
- SMS Framework
- SMS User
3. Go to admin/smsframework/gateways and select and configure your default gateway
4. Go to admin/notifications/settings and check 'Notify poster of own posts' for testing purposes
5. Go to admin/notifications/settings/ui and enable the desired subscription types
6. Go to user/1/notifications/nodetype and subscribe to the desired node type
7. Go to user/1/edit or user/1/mobile (depending on your SMS Framework build) and follow the steps to set up and confirm your mobile number
8. Post a node of that type and wait for your SMS message!
The SMS Framework module is still under development and is not recommended for production use.