Photo by ipadhacks (Creative Commons)

Reach your on-the-go audience with mobile tech

Guest post by Brett Meyer and Betsy Ensley
ThinkShout, Inc.

By now, you may be tired of hearing about how important it is to think about “mobile.”

For one thing, it’s a huge topic. Do you need to think about mobile marketing? SMS fundraising? Responsive design vs. a dedicated mobile site?

The answer is, of course, “Yes.” But then you get into problems of time, scale, and cost, because really, mobile needs to be thought of holistically, not in some piecemeal, “Oh, the Red Cross raised a lot of money, so we should do a mobile fundraising campaign, too” kind of way.

Just for fun, let’s review the numbers, because they’re becoming more compelling all the time. Up to 23% of all web traffic flows through mobile devices already. According to Pew, of American adults:

• 26% own an e-reader
• 31% own a tablet computer
• 87% have a cell phone
• 45% have a smartphone

Barring a counter-revolution, those numbers aren’t going down any time soon. Have you looked at your own website’s mobile traffic recently? If that’s dropping quarterover quarter, you may be doing something wrong.

All of this is just a long-winded way of saying that content delivery in the future will happen less and less through a traditional Web browser — and you need to prepare now.

Find your supporters and constituents where they are

To capture the impulse to give, you need to deliver your message to your constituents where they are — and increasingly, where they are is anywhere.

As you think about how to integrate your mobile marketing tactics with your mobile fundraising campaigns, don’t forget about program delivery. The tiny supercomputers people carry in their pockets open up new ways for you to serve your mission, particularly when it comes to using maps.

Now, before you curse us for adding one more thing to suss out of the knot that is mobile strategy, rest assured that it’s getting easier. There are plenty of great examples of nonprofits using mobile mapping technologies in ways that will inspire you to push our collective abilities even further as you map out your overall mobile roadmap.

There are three ways you can combine mobile devices with mapping technologies:

• to collect and aggregate data;
• to display maps; and
• to deliver program.

Collecting data

Photo by remizova (Creative Commons)

Setting aside the inherent privacy concerns, you can think of your mobile as a personal locator. What Apple did with “Find My iPhone,” you can do for your fieldwork.

Ushahidi brought this technology into the public consciousness when it mapped post-election fallout in Kenya in 2008 by soliciting reports from mobile phones, but the technology can be applied to any number of cases. To wit:

• The Brazilian NGO Rede Jovem sent young reporters, equipped with GPS-enabled mobiles, into Brazilian favelas to increase the detail available about these largely unmapped slums. The resulting reports (including photos and videos, in addition to geographic information) were mapped using the Google Maps API.
• The New York Times created a map of bird-watching spots in the city using a combination of Mobile Commons (to collect the data from text messages) and Google Fusion Tables (to place the reports onto a map).
• Mobile Commons set up another campaign in Detroit to try to tie unusually high asthma rates in one neighborhood to heavy truck traffic. Residents were asked to text “TRUCK” whenever they saw one, and that data was plotted onto a map. And it validated the hypothesis. Voila: crowdsourced mapping for social change!

Displaying maps

Simply displaying a map embedded into your website seems like the simplest case of employing mobile mapping technology, right?

During a recent conversation with a pet hospital about their website, including its potential mobile functionality, the topic quickly turned to audience: Did they know the primary reason people visited their website from a mobile device? The suspicion was that directions (and a map) to the hospital because a pet needed urgent care was the primary driver of mobile traffic, so it would make sense (if proved true) to put that right up front on any mobile site they worked on.

The problem is, it can be tricky to embed mobile-friendly maps into a website. Brad Frost lists four reasons for this:

• Cramped screen space: because the mobile browser takes up additional screen real estate.
• Frame Inception: “An iframe exists within a page which exists within a browser which exists within the mobile operating system.”
• Superior native experience: dedicated mapping apps are more robust than an embedded map.
• Performance overhead: with bandwidth still limited for mobile, pages need to remain lightweight.

Maybe embedding maps isn’t easy after all. The solution? Static images.

Wait, what? Static images? Don’t worry, it’s cool: you can use Google’s Static Maps API to embed a map into your website for full-size browsers, but display a static image on mobile devices, which then links to your phone’s default mapping application. That’s some geeky goodness!

(Hopefully, the animal hospital would take things one step further, using location services to collect a mobile visitor’s current location, and then link that to the best driving directions to the hospital.)

Delivering program

The next step up would be to develop responsive code that functions well in a mobile browser to deliver on program goals, as the Intertwine Alliance did here in Portland. The Intertwine Alliance was focused on increasing visitation to regional parks and trails in the Portland metro area. This goal had a twofold approach: to allow advanced planning through desktop displays and to give visitors at the park tools for locating trailheads from their mobile devices.

The responsive map interface, built with Leaflet, custom MapBox tiles, and Drupal, also incorporates HTML5 browser location detection to help visitors find parks near their current location.

MapBox is an excellent tool for map development. Focused on user experience, MapBox takes a design focus to mapping that is powered by OpenStreetMaps. This focus on the the front-end also translates into the tools provided to get users started. With well-documented training, the barrier to entry in publishing beautiful maps and getting started with their custom tile development tool, TileMill, has been dramatically lowered.

For responsive implementation, you should get familiar with Leaflet, an open source JavaScript library. For technologists unfamiliar with Leaflet, the site also hosts many tutorials for making the most of mobile-friendly, interactive maps.

Combining all of these tools, and in partnership with OpenPlans and Substance in developing and launching TheIntertwine.org, we were proud to launch a beautiful and useful tool to promote civic engagement in Portland area trails and parks. We were also especially happy to hear that the site won a national award presented by American Trails!

Given all the free and open source tools available — for a more complete overview, be sure to check out the NTEN article Terms and Trends in DIY and Open Source Online Maps by Sean Larkin — we look forward to seeing what you come up with.

How are you using mapping technologies with mobile devices? Let us know by commenting below!

The post Is your nonprofit using responsive mapping? appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Cause organizations, NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, political reformers, educators, journalists, general public.

Over the past three years, as regular readers know, Socialbrite has put together dozens of guides and compilations of resources and tools for social change advocates. See the bottom of this article for a few, and our Sharing Center is all about social tools for social change.

To celebrate Internet at Liberty, a conference on protecting protecting freedom of expression on the Internet that Google is organizing in Washington, D.C., this week — and where Socialbrite is running the social media workshops — we’re launching a new section today:

The Social Advocacy Toolkit features new and updated informational guides, tool roundups and resources for global activists, social good advocates, political reformers, NGOs and anyone looking to use online tools for social change. It includes tactics for effective campaigns, guides to the best monitoring and metrics tools (many of them free), lists of enabling platforms and organizations and other resources to help galvanize your campaign.

Below is a new guide that we’ve put together to help social change activists with their advocacy efforts, which we’re adding to the toolkit. Check out the Social Advocacy Toolkit for much more.

10 tools for activists & social change advocates

Asana: A leap ahead for productive teamwork

1Asana is a work-collaboration software suite that came out of beta in April 2012. “We built this company to change the world,” said founder Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook. Asana offers a simple, word processor-like interface to give people working together on a task a central place to discuss the project, share files and keep track of to-dos in real time. It’s free for teams of fewer than 30 users.

Alternatives: Yammer, Microsoft Sharepoint (for larger enterprises) and see our Collaboration roundup

PopVox: Advocate your cause in Congress

2You might remember our recent article on PopVox, an online service that individuals and grassroots organizations can use to lobby members of Congress on behalf of a cause. CEO Marci Harris founded the nonpartisan service based on her knowledge of how Congressional staffers interact with the public. For a cause to be effective, it has to be made concrete on behalf of or against a specific bill. PopVox helps you do that.

Geo-bombing with Google Earth

3I was blown away when I saw Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org (The Core) link video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth. Now, as you fly over the Tunisian presidential palace using a Google Earth KML file, you will see it covered with videos about human rights abuses that strongman Ben Ali tried to prevent Tunisian citizens from watching by blocking YouTube and DailyMotion. Visit earth.google.com/outreach for more examples. We’d like to see more organizations to take up “geo-bombing.”

Mapping tools: Show, don’t tell

4Any campaign or cause organizations with tech talent should consider following the steps of charity: water, which does a remarkable job of documenting their clean-water projects for individual donors through the use of Google Maps. Paull Young, their director of digital engagement, told me: “We’ve been marking all our water projects with GPS since we were founded in 2006. We had a developer crank for a few weeks late last year to create this new mapping solution. It’s not incredibly technically difficult, the hardest part is getting data from the field. You might also want to check out our Dollars to Projects reporting for even more in-depth personalized mapping.” Also doing a good job with Google Maps: A Child’s Right.

Note: Google began charging for its previously free Google Maps API last year, leading to an exodus to the open source OpenStreetMap, which we expect will continue to get better and better.

Tableau Public: Infographics made simple

5You may have noticed the Infographics Everywhere trend that’s sweeping the Web, probably spurred by the fact that infographics has been democratized — you no longer need to be a graphics guru to make a swift-looking graphic. Why not boil down your cause or campaign to a couple of key infographics? The tool we like best is Tableau Public, because it’s good and it’s free. For visualizations, Wordle and Many Eyes create great-looking word clouds. But before you plunge in, see this fantastic set of Data Visualization and Infographics Resources from Smashing Magazine — and make sure what you create isn’t info porn.

Statf.ly: Create a metrics dashboard

6What’s a campaign without a metrics dashboard, to tell you with data-driven evidence what’s resonating with your community — and what’s falling flat? There are a few newcomers to consider: Statf.ly (we like the 30-day free trial and $19/month pricetag), Sparkwi.se and Metricly. It’s worth the investment. See which one works for you and gives your campaign traction and tweak your campaign on the fly.

Dropbox: Life in the cloud is sweet

7I’ll be straight up: My hands-down favorite productivity and collaboration tool of the decade so far has been Dropbox. What was life like before the cloud? Oh, yeah, it was a pain to get stuff done. Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs and videos anywhere with an Internet connection — and share them easily. Any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Never email yourself a file again! Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage space for free, plus 500MB more if you refer a friend who signs up. It can get pricey when moving up to Dropbox for Teams, so see what your budget allows.

CitizenTube: Get visibility for your cause videos

8CitizenTube is YouTube’s News and Politics Blog. You’ll find important breaking news videos from citizens and other newsworthy videos from news organizations, activists and politicians. You are creating your own media, right? Why not get it seen by YouTube’s legion of viewers? See a different version of it here, and follow @CitizenTube on Twitter.

Buffer: Cross-posting nirvana

9If you’re running a cause campaign, there aren’t enough hours in the day, right? So think productivity. Shonali Burke, who recently left Socialbrite, told me: “Buffer is killer. It lets you send updates to Facebook, Twitter, etc. straight from your Google Reader or a browser. You can also post them directly from Buffer. Spread them out over the day. I’m just loving it and using HootSuite less. I tend to do most of my reading via Reader, and it’s super easy to star the posts that interest me, then sort by starred items, and then add to Buffer.” The basic version is free, for up to 10 posts at a time; for heavy users, you can get the paid version.

GroupMe: Keep in touch with your team members

10If you’re at an event — a conference, a street protest, a peaceful march — with other team members, you know how difficult it it to stay in touch and to coordinate plans. Socialbrite recently gave GroupMe a test run and came away impressed. GroupMe is a free group messaging app. I like it because it’s both instant and asyncronous — that is, your teammates will see your updates instantly or when they next check their mobile devices. Call up GroupMe and invite others in your posse to join your private group. Type your update and send it to the group, as you would an SMS message, and they’ll see it in a chat thread. One of GroupMe’s key features is that it’s cross-platform: You don’t miss a beat whether you have an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or another kind of smartphone. In addition to the ability to share messages, photos and locations like the other apps, GroupMe also allows old-fashioned conference calls between group members.

Alternative: Facebook Messenger

Other tools worth a shoutout

The tools above aren’t the only ones that should be in your advocacy arsenal. Consider some of these as well:

• See our writeup on Digital Democracy and its Handheld Human Rights mobile platform for human rights in Burma/Myanmar.

• GeoChat, from InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), is a collaboration tool that allows anyone to chat, report and get alerts on their cellphone and to map data on Google Earth, Google Maps or Virtual Earth. It uses SMS, email, and Twitter.

• Ushahidi and Frontline SMS are must-have mobile tools for anyone working with remote communities or in disaster relief areas. And they have broader uses as well.

• Join.me is a cross-platform screen sharing app that lets you give control of your computer screen to someone else.

• Shortstack, says my partner John Haydon, “is my number one choice for creating amazing Facebook Page custom tabs. You can create photo contents, reveal tabs, photo galleries and more. Check out this example of what you can create with Shortstack.” It costs $15 a month to start.

• NodeXL is a tool for finding connections between people or organizations. Mostly for geeks as it’s a bit daunting.

• If This, Then That is another interesting tool I just discovered. It helps you create certain actions when a task is triggered, like “send me a text message when my organization is mentioned on Facebook.”

• Jing from TechSmith, Screenr and Screenflow for Mac are three of the best tools for creating screencasts.

Guides for social change advocates

Here are some of Socialbrite’s other guides for social change:

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools (JD Lasica)
• 12 open source tools you should be using (Kim Bale)
• 12 awesome platforms for social good (Katrina Heppler)
• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change (Barbara K. Iverson)
• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist (Dan Pacheco)
• A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change (Allyson Kapin)
• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools (Nathan Freitas)
• 6 productivity tools for social change (Katrina Heppler)
• Complete guide to creating a video project (Tim Davies)

Related

• Making media: Tools & resources for nonprofits and social change organizations (Socialbrite)
• 10 top collaboration tools for your organization
• The Socialbrite Sharing Center
• Directory of cause organizations (Socialbrite)

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