UK Charity Text Donations

I was replying to a post by @edent  and it turned into a long comment so I thought I would post it up here.

 

 

At Mobile Tech For Social Change in London on May 23rd  Terrance Eden and others came up with an idea for donating unused mobile minutes to charity, the UK mobile operators converting that talk time for cash.

Unfortuanatly I was not able to attend but had attended a previous #M4change barcamp in San Francisco in November and will be at the one in Barcelona later this month.

I like the idea but having been campaigning for a year to sort our simple SMS text donations I thought the operators had a higher priority in the CSR area….

Hi @edent

I think its a great idea and I have been in discussions about similar schemes for unused loyalty points from supermarkets (e.g. nectar) and also unused interest in accounts in the financial sector.

The barriers are many as you say.

But before they get distracted with your idea I think the uk mobile operators (vodafone being the most progressive in this space IMHO) should be spending any time around mobile and charity sorting out the following:

1. MNO’s are charging VAT on 100% of SMS based charity donations today. This is illegal, full stop. They should be only charging VAT on the amount that the MNO keeps for processing the SMS and the billing.

2. In order to do 1 above they need to allocate some of the shortcode.com short-codes to charitable purposes and encourage uk aggregators and agencies to offer the charities SMS donation services. I understand we are close to agreement to use the 70xxx range of short-codes for this purpose, but I am not holding my breath.

3. MNO’s should honestly consider what is a fair charge ( as a percentage or as a fixed fee per transaction ) to take from the donation submitted by the MNO’s customer. Ideally Charities would like 100% like in the case of Comic Relief 2009 and the 2004 Tsunami but the businesses between them and the donor ( Charity <-> Agency (poss.) <-> Aggregator <-> MNO <-> Donor ) all need to be sustainable and at least cover their costs.

If there is light monitoring / regulation around the proposed 70xxx series of short codes to ensure that only agencies on behalf of register uk charities use the improved pay out rates then text message donations could have as positive affect on charities as the amazingly successful Just Giving.

< /campaign>

Places to find our more if you are interested:

3 people from mobile industry that has been helping the Institute of Fundraising to change 1,2 and 3 above….

my website http://www.mCharity.co.uk

other agency in uk headed by campaigner Roger Craven http://www.vir2.co.uk/

big mobile agency great charity campaigns http://www.incentivated.com/

mobile aggregator i am involved with http://www.winplc.com/

comic relief success http://www.whatsontv.co.uk/reality/comic-relief-2009/news/comic-relief-may-have-set-text-msg-world-record/5436

recent press release: http://www.professionalfundraising.co.uk/home/content.php?id=1809&pg=2&cat=2

IoF website: http://www.institute-of-fundraising.org.uk/

Golden Ticket Viral Marketing

 

viral-marketing

GOLDEN TICKET

The guys at carsonified have come up with a great online marketing campaign for their series of conferences, Future of Web Apps, Future of Web Design, Future of Mobile and Fuel.

Basically they want people to hear about their conferences through other peoples efforts to “advertise” on their blogs and generating comments. See here for the competition.

MOBILE VIRAL MARKETING

It got me thinking about mobile viral marketing. How can mobile services improve on what already exists for online campaigns.

What we need is the operators to expose the how messages are sent through their networks.

The idea would be that anyone can submit a message to the operator marked as a viral message, this could be an advertiser, individual, blogger etc. The message is submitted through an interface which allows the operator to track when the viral message is forwarded.

The operator provides an interface to view the statistics associated with your message, you can see how many times the message was forwarded, you could match this up with actual click through on your mobile site received from sending the message.

MMS

This type of mobile viral marketing would be well suited to MMS, no need to trawl through the 100′s of millions of SMS just the few million MMS per day to provide the info, wouldn’t even need be real time. MMS would be well suited to containing advertising / marketing messages with its image and video capability.

CROSS-NETWORK OPTIMISM

Now I am being really optimistic but how great would it be if the operators worked together so that the way the messages were traced was consistent across all networks so you could tell from the outside when messages are sent from one network to another.

CHARITY USES

I think this technology would be extremely useful for the charity sector as well. Most causes, world wide events are spread virally, if there were a method of sending the message out and tracking its success and reach the larger charities would be very interested.

SOLUTIONS

There are some companies out there with solutions for the operators to make this happen. Vantrix, Mobixell and Amethon all have products which provide the trace through the networks messaging systems and provide the stats.

Let me know what you think of the opportunity for mobile viral marketing, remember I need 25 comments to be entered into the draw for the carsonified prize.

Carsonified

Nokia N95 and Mac Book

1.  Blogging Dead? Well I have not really got into this blogging lark yet and everything I read by everyone else is saying that in depth blogging is dead or dying. People are moving to the easy life of short posts like twitter or using QIK to post a live video. If there is someing interesting going on then they will create a tinyurl and post it to twitter.I guess there will always be room for some comment on blogs but maybe submitting a Twit or uploading you comments via SMS or MMS is the future, what do you think?  Nokia N95Got the N95 finally from Orange today. Works a treat best Nokia yet, apart from the Nokia 7650 that is still my best ever phone, but thats cause MMS is my baby – some <wrongly> say I invented because I go on about it – but thats for another blog post.

Mac Book Battery Also my Mac Book battery had packed up – the black cross of death appears where the percentage charge should be – I need to wait a week for a replacement battery. Not happy but the customer service at Farpoint Developments in Bath was as excellent as ever.

Designing and Specifying iPhone Apps

Designing and Specifying iPhone Apps

I asked the twitterverse for a list of tools to help to specify requirements for an iPhone App.

I got some great responses so thought I’d better write them down and share with the class.

Wireframes / Mock Ups

I had been using http://lovelycharts.com/ to create mock ups in the past. This is great but struggled to find any iPhone specific image assets to use to help me.

Someone mentioned a tool called balsamiq http://www.balsamiq.com/and it seems to be perfect for the job. I will give away a free copy worth $79 at the next openMIC event ( http://openmicamp.ning.com/ )

If you already use OmniGraffle then aparently these stencils are good http://theresaneil.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/wire-frames-for-iphone-web-application-design/or here http://graffletopia.com/stencils/437

If you are using Photoshop then there are some PSD files here http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=447

If you just want to use powerpoint as your tool of choice then there is a powerpoint available for download here. http://www.slideshare.net/graiz/wireframe-parts-iphone-interface-design-presentation?src=embed

If you are using Visio then there are some templates here http://www.bretteddy.com/iphone/

Somebody also said that the best way of creating the wireframes was to use pencil and paper, if you prefer that you can download an image to print as a guideline for your drawing. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=770666

Developer Tools

I founs some of the resources listed above from tools listed for developers, you know the teach yourself iPhone development type resources. The best list I have foind for that type of thing is here http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/iphone-application-and-website-development-all-tools-and-tutorials-you-need/

Hope this is useful, feel free to copy and paste it into your blogs etc if you think other people you know would be interested and dont forget to join the mobile app development community at http://openmicamp.ning.com/

Cheers Chris

September 4th 2009

http://twitter.com/bookmeister

Company Research through Linked In

Linked In has improved amazingly in the last 12 months since the threat of Facebook I suppose they had to.

 

Company Profile

 

I love the way that they have introduced a facility to 

 

which provides lots and I mean lots of information on the company that an individual works for. It shows

• a company summary,
•  a list of employees who are in your network, 
• popular linked in people
• related companies
• top job titles
• top universities

Unlike Facebook Linked In in the professional context becomes more and more useful the more you use it. They only add functionality if it is to be useful to the users.

I found my most recent role via a cold email after searching linked in by my geographical area, fantastic result.

How do you use Linked In?

MMS is Dead

MMS is DEAD Its been 7 years since we started work on MMS and will be 6 years in August since the much hyped launches of the service by all of the mobile operators in the UK.   So where are we with this service, the supposed launch pad to 3G?   Most people I speak to in the mobile industry wrote it off 2 or more years back. Usage is climbing as the usability and penetration of good devices increases. But it hasn’t  gone through the rapid increase of usage we witnessed with SMS in the early naughties or the increase in WAP requests in recent years. I am sure there haven’t been too many MMSC capacity upgrades required yet. Only in America  Its widely reported in the US that MMS volumes are sky rocketing though, maybe because of the relative newness of mobile messaging (no major sms legacy) or the fact that most contracts come with high numbers of MMS bundles built in. Maybe there is just more to photo and video in America. MMS Re-suss?   Is it possible for this service to be brought back from the dead?  I believe so, but I am the minority. Its my baby and in the immortal words of Radiohead – I want to pull it out of the air-crash.Lots of good has been done by the operators, equipment vendors and device manufacturers (apart from my friends at apple).

• improved provisioning
• improved device interoperability
• ease of use of MMS application on phone

 But more needs to be done. I will add blogs discussing what I think we can do to re-suss MMS on the following topics.

1.  Retail Pricing
2. Viral Content
3. Wholesale and Premium Rates
4. MMS as a Bearer for lots of stuff
5. Its role in Mobile Marketing and Advertising
6. Let Charities utilisse it

Please let me know what you think about mms by posting comments here or emailing at chris <dot> book <at> mobilize <dash> consulting <dot> com

Boo!

Dont tell moverley but *they* are here. And right next to the orange stand too.

PA CONSULTING

Not the most exciting brand in the world. Wwwyzzywwyzz

Coffee

It takes 30 mins to get a coffee but its full of mobile fun. Where are all the ex orange people i wonder?

Barcelona 2008 – MWC08

The view from the conference could look good even though full of suits.