e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Online Advocacy Tools: SMS Text Messaging

July 3rd, 2006

Updated June, 2008

Cell phone text messages are the final political tool we’ll consider. If you’ve spent the last year or two building up your thumb strength and agility while keeping up with which bars have good drink specials (as I write the original version of this article, I was looking at a friend’s message from the previous night that said, and I kid you not, “CcCome to bedinbl” — Jen had maybe been at a barstool a little too long…), you already know that text messages are an efficient way to get a brief burst of text in front of a lot of people at once.

Their limitation lies in the brief part — text messages are too short to include much persuasion, so they’re best used in triggering an action that you’ve preplanned. Particularly outside the U.S. (creative cell phone uses have lagged in the States), organizers have used mass text messages to alert people to the location for a rally or demonstration and give authorities little time to counter them. You might use them for similar purposes or to spark an immediate cell call to a campaign target, for instance a Congressmember or corporate CEO.

You’ll need to have educated your activists beforehand through other means, probably via email, but the text message can generate an immediate action when you need it. The trick will be getting the right target phone number to the right activist, but that’s why you hired a top-notch vendor (hint).
Probably the most immediate use of text messaging in the U.S. will be for election-day Get-Out-The-Vote efforts, though you can also use them as a two-way tool by soliciting information from supporters through polls and such. But the really interesting uses of mobile technologies are probably still a couple of years away, and savvy campaigns are gathering supporters’ cell numbers now for applications that haven’t yet been dreamed up.

Note also one particularly interesting use of cell phones for fundraising in the 2008 election cycle: the John Edwards campaign contacted list members via text, urged them to call a number and listen to a recorded message, then connected them to operators to take donations right away. The results were said to be good, though the campaign did not repeat the attempt that I know of.

Next: Political Databases

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