Mobile for Advocacy & Social Organizing

Why Mobile? Always on, everywhere. As of June, 91% of US Adults carry a cell phone.

Phone communication can be broken down into Voice, Text, and Data (Apps and Web)

Voice and text are available on even the most basic phone, the primary limitations lie in the service plan of the end-user, and whether or not they have a limited amount of, or opted out of entirely, sending and receiving calls and/or text messages

Things to consider:

network coverage (if signal is weak the call quality will suffer or the call will drop altogether),
if outside of network coverage the call will not be received, service (i.e 'minutes', 'roaming') charges and distance,
calls are live (no record of call unless it was recorded, or notes were taken) and can be easily missed,
calls must be scheduled to when both people are available at the same time,
only capable of one-to-one/party calls, but very resource intensive.

Benefits:

Things to consider:

Must be opt-in and provide obvious way to opt-out at any time,
limited to 160 characters (though if more is required, it can be broken into multiple messages [i.e. include 'Message 1/2'], but this should only be used if absolutely necessary),
in the US, people are charged to both send and receive messages (but not the rest of the world),
different carriers may have policies regarding international texting

Benefits:

Inexpensive,
people will always read a text message when received (Don't abuse it! Make it as concise and beneficial to their interests as possible),
"Store-and-forward" (if a person is out of coverage, the message will be received as soon as it is possible),
Does not require strong or consistent cellphone coverage,
both people will have a record,
highly scalable,
allows one-to-many communication of important information,
can be automated to auto-reply,
use key words to collect or provide information,
create user groups, and
more advance web-interaction.

Many tools are available that do essentially the same thing with varying costs, scalability, requirements, setup, and maintenance
FrontlineSMS
- can use basic phone (and it's cell service) and laptop (no internet required) to send and receive messages and can be set up to automate services using keywords.
Frontline SMS for Android
- The same service ported to be Android-native, meaning all that is required is a phone running Android and cell service (However, this project is out of development and may develop bugs, but in experience it was fairly reliable)

TeleRivet
- Web and Mobile-web based, it can be set up on a computer (with internet) and run from a phone with both cellular coverage and a

Jordan used an automated service to record and map event attendance as a way to demonstrate,
also used at demonstration to measure commitment of attendees to easily include in future news and updates

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