Blog: Mobile Campaigns

Join Us Thursday at 2:00 pm in Barcelona or Online

Everyone who wants to integrate Drupal with an sms campaign should come to tomorrow's session SMS and Drupal. It's starting right after lunch at 2:00 pm in the Picktek room. The goal of the session is to let people know about some of the exciting things you can do with sms and about some of the great tools that already exist. There will be a live stream of the talk from the official DrupalCon website.

I'm moderating tomorrow's session and had a great meeting today with all the players to prep for it. Will White, the Summer of Coder who worked on sms integration, and his SoC mentor Ian Ward planned out a demonstration of the new sms API, while Jeff Miccolis flushed out some of his past experiences with sms campaigns to talk about, including one with Planned Parenthood. We also got to meet Chad Phillips for the first time, who was a huge help to Will this summer in getting sms to email integration working (which allows small Drupal sites to have free sms integration). Chad will end the presentiment with a demo of his work on a two-way email gateway functionality.

Everyone who was at the Google Summer of Code presentations today got to hear a short teaser of the work Will has done. Tomorrow you'll get to hear all the details and see a live demo. You can watch Will's screen capture SMS Email Gateway + Send to Phone Inline SMS Filter for Drupal if you want to get another sneak peak. 

Obama Tests Out Political Ringtones

One of the pieces of tech advice I’ve heard over and over again in the past few months is that if political candidates want to engage younger voters they need to do it on their turf and in their language. This is good advice, and in many ways it seems to be sinking in. But unfortunately it hasn’t translated to all new mediums.

On the face of it, Barack Obama’s new ringtones are fantastic and a smart new medium to experiment with. Last year ringtones became a $500 million industry in the United States. Statistically, last year almost half of all ringtone downloaders were under 25, according to a study by the NPD Group. Of downloaders, 22% of downloaders were between 18 and 24 years old and 26% were between the ages of 13 and 17. The latter group may not help your get out the vote efforts but can be great for building momentum.

Using cell phones in outreach campaigns is one way to show that you're tech savvy and on the cutting edge, but the flip side is that it's still very much a new notion that is still being tested. At the Politics Online Conference yesterday, one session focused on when and how to use cell phones to organize and communicate.

Development Seed's Eric Gundersen was on of the speakers on the panel, along with Dan Weaver from MobileAccord, Stuart Shapiro from iConstituent, and Justin Oberman from Rave Wireless and MoPocket who moderated.

People always have their cell phones with them and rarely share their phone with their spouse or anyone else. Dan says this is what makes cell phones such a powerful and personal advocacy tool. It also is a great way to let your supporters act for your cause while they go on living their life - sending or receiving a text message or making a quick call really can be done from anywhere.