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.

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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/

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

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

• 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

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.