 Conference is being recorded. Welcome to TechSoup Talks. This is Kami Griffith and today's topic is using mobile technologies for outreach and education. I am joined by Michael Sabat and Adam Shaiyavit. I first want to just get started by saying a little bit about myself. I'm the Training and Outreach Manager here and we've been conducting webinars for about a year. Adam, can you tell me, Adam's from Boston After School and Beyond. Can you tell us a little bit about your program there? Sure. Boston After School and Beyond is the out-of-school time intermediary for Boston. That means we work with the city, local funders, and local service providers to expand and improve the system of out-of-school time opportunities for youth, actually children K through 12 in the city of Boston. Excellent. Thank you. And we'll be hearing much, much more about Adam's program in a few minutes. And Michael, can you tell us, Michael from Mobile Commons and can you tell us a little bit about that and your role there? Sure. So Mobile Commons is an online application that makes it easy for organizations to launch and manage mobile campaigns. And I am the Community Manager and kind of in charge of a lot of the customers there. And so over the past year or so launched and helped promote many, many mobile campaigns for nonprofits and political organizations and advocacy groups, organizations like that. Excellent. Thanks. And for the folks out there, we are talking to Mobile Commons because Adam has been working with them through the course of his project. So we thought it was a nice tie-in to have them present as well. So I would like to quickly go over the agenda for today. This is an hour-long webinar and we're going to first start talking about the basics of mobile technology and using mobile to provide services and to broadcast information. So we'll have time to talk about each of those separately. And what you should do to get started and then there will be about 15 minutes for audience Q&A. But again, if you have any questions that you want answered immediately, please do send those through the chat. And the question and answer portion will all be questions that are taken through the chat. I also want to go back here and thank Becky Wieg and my co-worker for clicking away, answering questions on the chat, and also Laura Newton who is volunteering for TechSoup. She created this webinar today. Actually, she did an amazing job of pulling all this information together. So I want to thank Laura for that. So I would like to get started with Michael. Why is it important for nonprofits and libraries to start thinking about how they can use mobile technology? So from the stats you see here, there's a lot of it going on. There's a lot of text messages being sent. Pretty much everybody now has a mobile phone and it's just going through all demographics and all age groups are starting to text. So it's arrived in that sense for a communication medium. The things that make it a little different from email and from the other ways to communicate with constituents is most importantly, there's no spam on text messaging. So people really pay attention here. Everybody has their phone within five feet of them for most of the day and when text messages come in, they look at them right away. It's an instant phoneless communication, so when you need people to take action right away, they will do it because they get it and they pay attention to it right away. And that's the whole thing. People really pay attention to text messaging. And kind of something that may be a little more in the background is it's one of the best ways to communicate with both rich people and poor people. So obviously, mobile is very hot when we think about iPhone apps and things like that, but I think something like a third of the U.S. doesn't have broadband service regularly at home. So this is one of the best ways to communicate with those people, those underserved markets. Excellent. Thanks. And Adam, what factors made Boston Episcope Beyond decide to undertake new mobile technology programs? Well, our goals are to reach high school age youth with program and public health information and also to give those same youth an opportunity to describe their experiences and to the broader public. And since we know generally that 80% of high school age youth across the country have cell phones, this seems like a natural fit. We couldn't imagine a more reliable way to reach the target audience with this information. As we'll describe later, we're providing information through a pull system, so we're not going to be broadcasting any messages to these youth, but we are creating systems, we hope to create systems that will allow them to pull information off of the Internet over their cell phones. Excellent. So now we're going to talk about the basics. So Michael, can you go over some of the basics for people who are new to mobile technology? Sure. So mobile is a little different. I spoke before about how there's no spam and the reason that is is because the carriers really oversee the messaging going on here. So just some of the terminology to start with. There's what's known as a short code and this is a five, sometimes a six-digit number and very rarely a four-digit number. And this is like a phone number for the use of text messaging for organizations. And to do a campaign, you probably want to get a short code for the organization. You can get your own, you can get a unique short code, you can get a random short code, and you can get a vanity short code where you choose the number, but you're definitely going to want to go through a short code. Mobile Commons, for instance, and there's other companies like this, they provide a short code when you sign up with their service. We also, though, when someone texts in, we need to know what campaign they're talking to and that's where the keyword comes in place. So you text in a keyword to a short code and that identifies for the provider, mobile Commons in this case, what campaign you're talking to and tells us how to respond. So when you text in the name of someone, when you're talking to an American Idol, when you're voting on American Idol, that name you text in is the keyword and you text that to a short code of five digit number. And there is an organization set up by the carriers to manage these short codes and kind of lease out the short codes. You can't buy them, but you can lease them in the rather expensive, but there's one branch of, there's one organization that leases these out and oversees them for organizations or providers like us to use. And there are a number of different campaigns that can happen over text messaging and over mobile. So the first one would be, and you can see the slide here, text alerts. So sending out, you know, up to the minute or information, reminders, things like that. Text to data, this is more of a pool system where you can text in a query, for instance, and get an answer back. If anybody's familiar with Google SMS, this is just a really, really big text to data system. The next one, text to voice. Because you're using a phone, you know, of course you want to incorporate voice into these programs if it makes sense. So you can text out, you can push out a phone number to people. They can connect to that phone number and you get them to take action and do a whole bunch of things. And we'll talk about that a little later. The fourth one down is called text to screen. And this is where people are texting in and their messages are appearing on a scoreboard or a Jumbotron, something like that, usually at a live event. You can also push it to the Internet so that people can text in whatever it is and you can moderate the messages in most cases and then display them. And then the last two, there are MMS and video. MMS is kind of picture messages. That's the way to think about that. There aren't as many standards with MMS as there are with SMS. So the different carriers treat MMS differently. And so it's not as smooth yet as SMS and it's also a little expensive. Same thing with video. This is kind of the Wild West here with this stuff. So the usage just really isn't there yet, but it's definitely coming very soon. And then smartphone apps, the iPhone apps, the Blackberry apps, very cool stuff. Again, the usage really isn't there for smartphone apps. I think like probably 99% are on the iPhone. And that's about I guess 6% of the market right now. I'm not sure. I know it's growing pretty quickly. But that's where we're at with the smartphone apps. Just they're cool but aren't for the public yet. Or aren't for the mass market I should say. And then for the sake of this demonstration we're going to talk a lot about pool technologies and push technologies. And I'd say the major difference here is with pool technologies, the person, the user is texting in and getting an answer back. And that's it. With push technologies, people text in and we get their permission to text them back when we want to. So similar to like an email campaign where we collect people's numbers, they opt in to receive future messages. And then we can send out messages to them when we want to. Now we're going to talk about the ways that nonprofits are using these technologies. So Michael, can you tell us about some of the types of programs using pool and push technologies that nonprofits can consider? Or actually just pool technology that nonprofits can consider? Yeah, so we have several people doing pool technologies. And just to review, that someone texting in basically a query and they want to find information. So the way we work is we help the nonprofit expose their data and make that very simple. This example is probably one of our most well-known campaigns that we empower. It's called the Fishphone. And with the Fishphone, a user can text in the word fish and then the name of a fish like tuna. And that looks it up in the Fishphone's database and texts them back the health environmental impact of eating that fish. And I know Adam's going to talk a lot more about this, but the benefits, what the Fishphone used to be was a wallet card that people would carry around so they could pull it out when they're at the grocery store and look at it and see, oh I should not eat tuna, I should eat salmon or whatever it says. When you do that with text messaging, first of all you reach a wider audience because everybody has a cell phone and this really spreads word of mouth. But just as importantly, you collect data on people. So what are people searching for? How often are they using this? What are they searching for that we haven't researched yet? And so our clients in this case can knows where they want to research next. And then also when you take it to funders and say look, this many people are now making decisions in the grocery store and we have proof of that or people are querying this when they're in the restaurant and now we have trackable proof. And then the final benefit just to the text messaging is that this is a story. The media does want to talk about this. So the fish phone has been written up in many, many newspapers, Parade Magazine, New York Times, Multiple Times, and then all over the Internet on blogs and things like that. So it's really helped transform that organization. Great example. And I know I have that piece of paper on my wallet too but then you either don't have that wallet or you forget to use it. Yeah and that's another thing. Nobody wants to print anymore right now too. So that's not in vogue. Right. We're trying to save the environment by not printing. So we're going to continue to talk about pool technology. So Adam, I understand that Boston Advice Phone Beyond is developing some innovative programs using pool technologies to serve your youth, constituencies. Can you tell us about your program? Sure. We are developing really scoping out a three-part system. The first two that I'll describe take advantage of data that we or other partners already possess. So we're developing the technology to deliver this content to cell phones but the content is really the most important part of it and that we've been developing for the past two years. The first system relies on the bostonnavigator.org website which is a comprehensive database of out-of-school time opportunities for kids K-12 in the boston area. It's available to anyone on the webinar who wants to look at it, just bostonnavigator.org and they share that middle end as you can see on the slide. Generally what we want to be able to do is use an interactive SMS interface that's on the next slide. And this is inspired by work we originally saw out of ISIS Inc. in San Francisco that runs a service called sexinfo-sf.org that provides sexual health information to users using a similar system. So the system we've scoped out will use a five-digit shortcode and users will text a keyword after school to that five-digit – let's pull up a little thing here. I'm trying to activate my pointer. There we go. Okay, so they'll text after school that five-digit shortcode and receive a menu with options. And I should say some of this interface is subject to change as we plan to focus group it in the fall. But generally the way it will work is that a user will text in a local address, their age, and then there will be some way to indicate their area of interest, arts, sports, academics, music, etc. In response to sending the message, they'll get a follow-up message listing two or three of the programs closest to them, probably within a quarter or half a mile of whatever location they enter in into the application. If you can advance to the next slide, we'll see that. So here's an example of what the users might receive if they reply with, for example, 31 Heath, age 16, and interest code in this case was one. If I conducted the same search on Boston Navigator, this is what would have appeared. There happened to be some opportunities at Diablo Glass Studio and also the neighborhood network television program. So that's the first system, to deliver program information to youth and youth workers. I should say that our audience for this service are both youth, high school age youth themselves, and the youth workers that support them. Boston is fortunate to have a number of youth workers that work on the streets really with disconnected and hard to serve youth. And we want them to have this information too, so that when the youth that they are serving express an interest, they can respond with information to that interest in real time, wherever they happen to be. So the next service, if you click on it to the next slide, is a public health information system. Again, using data that already exists, either at BostonResourceNet.org or some other partners that we're working with at the Boston Public Health Commission, we'll be putting a wide range of public health information online or I should say on mobile using a similar interface. So if we can advance to the next slide. And I can't control that slide progression, can I? Yeah, you can. Okay. So again, here users would text youth to that same five digit shortcode and they would get a message similar to the one here. Again, we're going to be testing this to make sure that it's the right kind of interface to use with youth. But in general, the system will again ask people probably to text in their zip code rather than their exact location. We don't want to scare people away by giving them the impression that we're tracking their address. But again, they'll text in their zip code, their age, and then a question code or some other, they'll have some other way to indicate their area of interest. Now I should say that we're exploring two systems. One is this text to a data system to deliver the information. The other is a text to person system. You know, it's unclear whether youth and youth workers are more likely to use a text to data system or a text to a person system, almost like a call center, you know, an SMS based distributed call center. And in that example, a youth would access the system again using a keyword and a five digit short code. They would get back a message something like this, you know, ask your confidential question about school, sex, parenting, drugs, violence, anxiety, et cetera. And then a cadre of volunteer experts certified in different content areas would respond within four hours. So in this case, the example here is someone texts in drug rehab in JP, which is short for Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston. And they might get back a message like this within, you know, a pretty short order. It'll be encouraging. It'll be personal. It will list the local resources. And it may ask, you know, the person may ask a clarifying question if they need to in order to respond well to whoever submitting the question. We'll determine which of these two systems to pursue, you know, text to data or text to person after a focus grouping of the options, hopefully in the fall. The third system that we are scoping out is a way for youth to communicate with each other and with the city generally about their lives, their experiences, their interests. We, you know, if you think about a Twitter feed for those of you familiar with Twitter, it would work in a similar way that there would be a, again, a five digit short code that youth could send messages to. And one of the models we're looking at is something called Ushahidi, which was developed originally in Kenya to track voter intimidation at Kenyan polling places. It's been used since in a number of other countries to do what's called crisis, I'm sorry, a crowdsourced crisis reporting. This latest example on the screenshot here is from India where Ushahidi was used to describe events around polling places in India. We have in mind something similar, but in order to give the youth participating a clearer framework for how to communicate with the system, we're exploring with various partners things like SMS text poetry, SMS storytelling programs that would give us an opportunity to engage youth in a literacy project and a creative project as well as an informational project. We want to make sure that youth who participate in this system enter information that will be meaningful to them, but not put them in any danger or report on incidences or events that may draw the attention of the police. If such communication is necessary, we hope they continue to use 911. But for our purposes, we really want to give youth a creative outlet, a way for them to let the broader city know about their lives and their experiences. So this third part of the system is probably the one that's least developed this stage, but our partners are well engaged and very excited about where it may go. Very good. So that was poll technology. Those are some great examples. And now we're going to move on and talk about push technology. So Michael, can you tell us about how some of the nonprofit organizations you work with have used mobile technology to push or broadcast messages and the kind of results that they've achieved? Sure. And I'm sure Adam would agree with this, like anything in life. You want to balance. So some of these people have push technologies and pull technologies. I think there's a lot of value in both from an organizational standpoint. Acquiring that list and being able to message that list when you need to is pretty important for a lot of our customers. One of the most valuable things there. So I'm just going to go through a lot of examples of what people do. So the first one, we're looking at a picture right now with HRC, the Human Rights Campaign. They build their list, whether it's people signing up online, people texting in at live events. They can also have people on the ground writing down phone numbers. And the important thing here is that people have to opt in to receive messages so they have to know that they're going to receive text messages from the organization. But there's a lot of best practices available and a lot of advice that we give our clients on how to do this. And they build fairly sizable lists. So some examples of some really good push campaigns. The biggest one that probably everybody knows about is for get out the vote for the elections. And many, many, many organizations did this, including Barack Obama obviously. And that's why he wanted to build that list of people texting in to find out who the vice president was. To be the first people to find out who the vice president was so that he could remind them to go vote. And the reason he was doing that in 2006, we powered a study by the University of Michigan and Princeton that showed the power of text messaging to get people to show up to the polls. And the quick summary is that when you send somebody a text message to remember to vote on the day before or the day of the election, they're about four and a half percent more likely to vote or that increases voter turnout by about four and a half percent. And just a simple text message. And the real interesting part was at a level of, I think the stat is about $1.50 per additional vote. And when you compare that to all the other methods, whether it's direct mail, leafletting, e-mail, text message was by far the cheapest way to do this. So canvassing increased the vote by about six percent, I think, but at a price of like $20 an additional vote. E-mailing was about the same, but in terms of how it increased the turnout, but again, it cost a lot more than text messaging. One other very quick example of a push technology is someone like do something. And I don't know if people are familiar with them, but you can text in to do something, you text in your zip code, and they will reply with volunteering opportunities in your area. And they're focused on getting youth involved in the communities. And again, just letting them know instantly about opportunities, the way that they talk, the way that they communicate, works very, very well for them, and they're growing very quickly. Another thing that was kind of in the summary is text to voice. So this is great for a few things. The first one is advocacy. So if you think about it, you have a list of people that want to hear from you. You send them a text message with a phone number in it. They can connect to that phone number. They can hear talking points which you create and record, and then they can be forwarded on to their congressperson, their governor, really any public official or anyone that you want them to talk to, they can be forwarded on anywhere. And then we can track those actions. So some of mobile comments clients, everybody, this is a very valuable tool for a lot of our clients. But people are placing 75,000 plus calls a month to elected officials on specific issues, and we can track that. And then we can also know that the people knew what to talk about with their officials because they heard a recording directly before they connected. And then another thing an organization did which was really cool was during Hurricane Ike, there were a bunch of rescuers, and they would send out to these people going down into Texas, they would send out conference call information with text message which makes a lot of sense because there's not a lot of internet and there's really no good way to communicate, but a simple text message that says, hey, call into a conference call line in 15 minutes was a great way for them to organize. Another kind of push technology, and this kind of is in between here, but text to screen, and this is really great for live events. In this example right here, you can see that this was surrounding healthcare, and an organization called It's Our Healthcare set up a Jumbotron outside of the California Capitol building, and people could text in their opinions on healthcare. And this was at a rally, and people were texting in whatever they wanted to say, and the Jumbotron was pointing towards the Capitol building, and the legislators, the lawmakers could read it. But also this was simulcast on the web, and so people could watch it and text in from anywhere in the state. They didn't have to be at the rally. And then the obvious thing to do once somebody starts interacting here is say, hey, can we give you future updates on healthcare in California in this case? Text back this keyword if you'd like to receive future updates and opt in. And then one more quick example of text to screen is the California Democratic Party set up outside of a Sarah Palin rally and had people text in questions for Sarah Palin. And this was back in October when the whole Katie Couric and all the interviews were going on. So people were texting in questions. She wasn't answering them, but she was on the billboard at the rally. And the same thing, they put it on the Internet and people started texting in from all over the country. They really built their list on that day because it got on a bunch of blogs and it was simulcast in a few places. And it's still up in a recorded version on Tech President. If anybody wanted to check that out, I'm sure you can search for it there. Great example. And just to remind everybody that we will be following up this webinar with an email, with a link to the recording, and all the URLs that we've been talking about today, a copy of the PowerPoint presentation. So we'll be including all of those websites that Michael and Adam have mentioned. So I want to move on. We've talked about push technologies, pull technologies, heard some great examples, but now let's talk about getting started. Michael, what are the first steps for a nonprofit that wants to get started using mobile technology? Sure. So the first thing is to set goals obviously with any project you're going to want to do that. And a good way to frame this is that mobile should be integrated in your entire communication strategy. What it's really going to do for you is it's going to increase the open rates on emails, the click-throughs on emails, people taking action from emails. It's going to help your list building from live events, things like that. So you should really look at it as an integrated part of your communication strategy, not something that stands alone. That really didn't work for anybody. The next thing is you're going to need some partners in how you do this, and mobile is quite confusing. So you probably want to find somebody to explain it to you, and I'm happy to do that if people would like that. But here's a quick breakdown of kind of the level of vendors. And there were a lot of questions about short codes too in the chat. So you don't have to do this, but this is one way to do this. At the highest level, the kind of the most intense and probably the most work is getting your own short code, getting it hosted with what's known as an aggregator. And that's at the top of the line vendor. And an aggregator has a direct connection with the carriers. They'll take your short code, host it for you, and then you will need a system that you build or that you get somewhere else to talk to the aggregator and let them know what messages to send, to what phone numbers, and then if you'd like to receive those messages. And that's the highest level. And short code prices are, for a random short code, it's $500 for a short code that you pick yourself. It's $1,000 a month. So there were a few questions about that, so I figured I'd answer. And that's at the most intense level. We have some customers that have their own short code. Most people use a shared short code. And when you start talking about shared short codes, that's probably the second level here, I'd say a management service. And Mobile Commons in this case would be a management service. We have the short code. You can use one of our short codes, which is probably recommended, and I'm sure Adam would agree with that too. So you don't have to pay for your own. We handle everything with the carriers, everything with the aggregator. And you log into a system like Mobile Commons that allows you to send messages and look at the messages you've received and manage these campaigns rather easily. And with this, there's going to be a monthly fee and probably per message cost as well. Below that is a messaging service. And with a messaging service, you're not paying so much for the management of messages, but you're paying to send messages so that you would be managing these lists yourself most likely. You would be opting people in, collecting the numbers yourself, and you're probably mostly paying just to send the messages somewhere. We have prices coming up, but pennies or 10 cents at most to send out a text message. But the data and the system integration really isn't there, as far as I know. And then the fourth level down is a marketing service. And with this, you can probably send your text messages. They won't charge you, but they'll tack on a little advertisement at the end of the text message. And depending on the organization, that may be okay, it may not be okay. Those are the levels. And then the shortcut options, I talked about them a little, but a vanity shortcut, you choose your own. It costs $1,000 a month to lease. A random shortcut, you can choose your own, or I'm sorry, you don't choose the number, but it's yours only. And that's $500 a month, and then a shared shortcut would be probably provided by a management service. Excellent overview. Now we're going to move to Adam, who's actually gone through this from the nonprofit's point of view, from idea to, from moving through all the ins and outs. So what considerations did you like to look at when getting started? Well, the first thing really was just, I couldn't agree more that a goal is, wrapping this service around a goal is really important. So we specifically wanted to communicate with high school age youth around these program and public health opportunities. And we wanted to create a way for youth to have their voice heard by the city at large. So once we had articulated those goals, it was relatively easy to figure out which technologies are most appropriate. That said, we had to do a lot of reading, or I had to do a lot of reading and figure out the different kinds of vendors and what services they offered and get comfortable with how they priced out their services and what we had to expect to buy. Before I get to that, I know we're going to get to the cost stuff in a different slide. I'll talk a little bit more about the automated systems and staff systems choices we were looking at. I saw in the chat that's coming in this webinar that someone asked, are these staff systems easier in places that don't already have databases developed? And I think for those folks listening who are thinking about any one of these systems, I don't think there's any easy way to provide quality content. The benefit of an automated system is that you can pull data from existing sources perhaps. Maybe information that's already been vetted for quality. And that's fine, but you still have to maintain that quality over time. We expect a lot of staff time involved in making sure that we're providing the right information to the right folks in a way that is actionable and usable, and most importantly connects those youth to caring and well-trained adults. The staff systems are, the advantages to them are that they're a little more personable. You don't have to depend on the computer to communicate warmth and caring to the user. But with staff systems, quality control becomes an issue. People while they may be warm and caring are never as predictable in their responses as a computer. And we want to take great care to make sure that the people answering questions that come in are doing so in a way that at least won't do any harm. That won't turn youth away from services or turn them off from services that they may really benefit from. So in some ways the technology behind any of these systems is the easy part. The harder part is making sure that you're delivering content that's accurate at least given our goals. The harder part is making sure that we're delivering information that's actionable, that is youth appropriate, and again won't turn anyone away or won't turn anyone off. The other thing that we're always aware of is that though SMS messaging is relatively inexpensive, we don't know enough yet about the costs that users may incur per text message. We know in general that teens, we think, we know that teens are trending towards contracts or cell phone contracts that have unlimited texting, but we don't know that for sure. And these messages for the user can cost up to $0.15 per message in coming or outgoing. We want to make sure that we're not adding to what we understand anecdotally to be a problem with cell phone debt that youth or their parents are getting into. There's a line here about advertising costs. We are considering including advertising in our messages to offset the cost of the system, but we'd only do that once the system had proven, a user base had demonstrated interest in the system and we had enough volume to warrant it. Here's some item here about opt-in. Michael, are you going to cover this around push technologies? Sure. So, I kind of went over this before, but yes, let me talk a little about costs, which you just mentioned, Adam. So, yeah, it can be up to as much as $0.20 per message, both ways, sending from the cell phone and coming into the cell phone. But I think the thing to keep in mind is your organization probably is not going to be the first person that the user texts, meaning like they'll text their mom or their girlfriend or boyfriend first. And so, people self-select to participate in the texting. And that's just something to keep in mind. And at the same time, we don't know this for a fact, but it seems that more people are getting both great plans. But with the push technologies, the big thing is getting people to opt-in. With mobile, with text messaging, these will not be ignored. These don't sit around for two days and then just get archived. So, the good part about that is people will see them and respond. The bad part is if they really didn't give you permission to text them and you kind of crossed a line or they're not worthwhile messages, people will just opt out and they'll get off the list. So, just something to keep in mind there. You want strong opt-ins, you want strong lists. It's definitely a quality game, not a quantity game. But these people will self-select and these people will be your biggest fans. And it's a really strong way to communicate with them with pushing out messages. Great. Thanks for the clarification. Now, we're going to dig in deeper on cost. So, Adam, based on the research that you've done, what kind of cost can someone looking at doing a mobile program expect to see? Yeah. So, for the volume of a system that we're scoping out which we're thinking about 5,000 messages a month more or less, the bottom line is that the costs that you can expect to incur are between $17,000 and $20,000 a year. You can go cheaper, but I think those cheaper systems are likely to involve much more demands of the buyer. You'll have to have a more technical savvy and be more willing to do more of the back-end work yourself. The thing that folks should look out for is that the vendors in this sector price that are worked very differently. Some have relatively large upfront one-time licensing fees for their software. Others have pushed the cost into monthly service contracts. Among the vendors that we've surveyed and we've talked to six so far, the costs all average out to around between $17,000 and $20,000 a year. But the vendors break their costs out differently. So, when folks are considering different vendors of their own, just be clear you understand where those cost centers are. If it's going to be a big one-time upfront cost, which the benefit of that is that in your second, third, fourth year of the system, your cost should go down after that first big payments made. Of course, you need that original budget to support that original one-time platform licensing fee. But generally speaking, again, folks keep $17,000 and $20,000 in mind for the technology side of the system. They should be okay. When we were building our own budget for this program, we had to put a lot of money into marketing, or say into that line item. Again, we're going to be looking at serving high school-aged youth. And anecdotally, again there hasn't been a lot of research on this, but anecdotally we understand that youth are more likely to use these systems when they are reminded of their existence on a regular basis. So we plan to take out ads on MySpace and Facebook, but also at the subway stations, the bus stations in Boston, in the schools, in the health centers, at gymnasiums, wherever we can think of to put either print or electronic advertising. So the budget for marketing is going to probably exceed that for the technology itself. We certainly hope to get as much of the print material donated or provided as an in-kind service, but it'll still be expensive whether it's a cash, whether we pay for it out of pocket, or whether folks provide it for free. I think that's about it on cost. Of course, if anyone has questions, please add them to the chat and I'll do my best to answer them as the webinar continues. Okay, so I'd like to take this time. We do have a slide of resources which I will talk about in a second. I do want to start answering some of the great questions that have come through the chat. So what I'm going to do is read off a question and then Adam and Michael, you can decide who is best to answer it. So one person, John Jacobson asked, will you be recommending sites for sending free text messages to multiple mobile phones via phone book? I think for that, for info, does that sound right, Adam? Yeah, that's the vendor that we've been in touch with when we consider that model. Yeah, I believe it's free messaging and they attach an advertisement to the back of it. I'm guessing they have a paid model as well where you can send messages without an advertisement. I don't know at what price level that would be, but that's when I went through the list of vendors. That is probably the biggest, one of the biggest in terms of doing that for organizations. And can you repeat the name again? For info and it's the number four and then the word info. Great. And they're big. I mean they're definitely the first hit in Google if you Google it. Another person is concerned about using this and the considerations for individuals with disabilities. Are there special tools for folks like that? It's a great question. I don't know of any and certainly we have in mind a broad base of cell phone users. So if a disability was getting in the way of a person's ability to use a cell phone at all, then frankly I just don't know of any ways to get around that. But that being said, we do hope that there may be text to speech applications on some phones that will allow people to have the phone read back a message that comes in. That's all I'm familiar with. Michael? Yeah, I can't. Nothing comes to mind right now. Okay. Another question from Lorena. We are interested in using text for donation and also sending out real-time info during disasters to guide people. Any advice? Yeah, something that we really didn't touch on I guess I skipped over. So mobile giving is also now in the universe of mobile, and that means that someone can text message a keyword and that counts as a $5 donation, which won't bill. And this is all done by the Mobile Giving Foundation. They handle the transaction. There's an application process which they oversee and they handle remittance of the payment. They pass to the nonprofit. You have to be a 501c3. You have to have been in existence for at least a year with an operating budget or annual revenues in the previous year of at least half a million dollars. And they pass through 100% of the donation. So it works great in certain situations. It's definitely not like an ATM. You still need to give people a reason to donate in order for them to text and donate to you, but it makes donating over the cell phone, what makes donating in general very simple and painless. There's no credit cards, no checkbooks, no cash. And then a mobile bill that's $5 and your mobile bill, which is mobile bill is very hard to read anyways. The Mobile Giving Foundation, they're on the web, mobilegiving.org. They require that you use what's known as an ASP, an application service provider. And there are a few of them. Mobile Commons is one of them. And I have a lot of experience with that. So I'm happy to dig into more questions that are offline, maybe if people want to email me or if everybody wants to know, we can talk about it. Adam, do you have any experience with Mobile Giving, or have you heard about any programs there? I don't. The only thing I've read is that it has not raised a tremendous amount of money except in very specific circumstances. You know, as a broad-based fundraising campaign, it can certainly augment a fundraising strategy, but it's unlikely, as far as I've read at least, to become a core part of any organization's fundraising strategy. It's more about fundraising marketing in a way. You do a little marketing about your organization, and some folks make a donation in return. Yeah, like anything. Yeah, so there's limitations. There's some good stuff and some not so good stuff. The limitation is really that we can only collect $5 from people right now. And at a time, they can do it five times per month, but each donation is $5. And then you cannot follow up with the people, so you can't collect any information once someone donates right now. Hopefully that will change. So yeah, it becomes a question like, do we want them to donate $5 or give their email address? And that all depends on the organization. But some people have had success with it. It works great when you can get up, when Bonna will get up at a concert and say, everybody take out your cell phones and text message in, or when American Idol. That was the most successful campaign so far, I believe. Alicia Keys did it on American Idol, and it works very well when you have that type of reach. Great example, and that will be hopefully a future webinar that we offer is more focused on the fundraising aspect of mobile. So Rob had a question about organizations that have already started using these technologies as part of their mission, and do they see people actually using the service, or has it not really caught on yet? So you could give us either of you some examples of organizations that have used it and what the response has been. This is Adam. We were originally inspired to pursue this specific track because of the work that ISIS Inc. has done in San Francisco and other cities regarding sexual health information for teenagers. We have not gotten, as far as I know, there's been no long-term research done on how well the system has been utilized. What we do know is that the usage of the system is really correlated to the marketing that the organization is doing. When the marketing is out there, the system gets used. As the marketing falls off, use of the system falls off. I think it's going to take a long time, assuming we get our system built and running. It's going to take a long time for it to enter the public consciousness of high schoolers in Boston. We expect to have to do a lot of aggressive marketing for a long time to keep up the usage. Yeah, and one thing, and Adam, you'll find this out if you don't know already, but one thing that works great is really engaging users. High school students will do it if you engage them and tell them about it. At least we found mixed results with mobile is just a call-to-action written on a piece of paper. It always helps if you can have someone tell them, hey, take out your cell phones, text this word into this number. That seems obvious, but again, you have to tell people to do it. You have to give them a reason to do it. And then it will work because it's the only device they have on them at an assembly in school or at a concert or something like that. So it's important to do really engaging call-to-action. That's the most critical part. And definitely not a high-tech thing. It's just communications. It's a people thing. One of the things that we're going to be doing in Boston to generate that interest among youth and youth workers is engaging them heavily in the ultimate design of the system. Just to be clear, we've scoped out the system here in Boston and we've enlisted the partners that will need to build it, but we're still waiting on our funding proposals to get a yay or a nay. But assuming funding allowing, we're going to launch this focus group process in the fall. And a part of that process is certainly to help us refine the interface and make sure that we're building a system that youth will enjoy using. But the other reason we're doing it is to engage a cohort of pilot users that will start the system up with us and will be most likely to use it in its first few months, tell their friends about it, and then of course provide us with ongoing feedback about how well the system is working for them. And I think this next question ties in nicely. John had a question. Does the text message from PC to mobile you have to have their cell phone number the person's cell phone's carrier? What's the best way to gather that information? So I'm guessing John, I just answered him on chat. I'm guessing John is talking about using an email gateway, which is something like if you text message number like 1234567891 at vtext.com, you can send them a text message kind of through your email. I mean that's what I'm guessing. That goes around the short code system. I don't know how much the carriers like that. Like I've heard they really don't like that because I don't think they make money on that text message being sent. The carriers do provide information. There's what's known as a carrier lookup. I think that has to be done with an aggregator. And there's a small charge for it. It's about a half a penny to look up a phone number, what carrier that is. But I'm not sure in terms of infrastructure to do that, like what type of system would need to do that. If you go to a provider that has a management system, like we automatically look up that information when someone texts in. I'm guessing most providers do. I just don't know. And you don't need to know the carrier. I don't think if you go with someone like ForInfo that's just sending messages for you. They should be able to take care of that for you. Can I jump in on the question? I just saw it coming on chat. I think it's really important. Definitely. Someone asked the question, if they only have $1,000 to $5,000 in their budget, is text just not for them? And the $17,000 to $20,000 cost that I described really reflects our plans, our volume expectations, et cetera. But there are simple ways to use mobile technology that are far cheaper. One of the greatest stories I heard was reported in The New York Times a few months ago is a place called, or service rather, called the Birds and Bees Hotline in Durham, North Carolina. And the way they work it, I think they have about a $5,000 budget. They put some advertising in MySpace, and I think just MySpace actually, and just said, look, here's a cell phone number. If you have a question about sex or sexual health, it's just a sexual health call. I'm sorry, send us a text, and we'll text you back. And it works. Youth, they were able to direct their advertising dollars to youth exclusively in the Raleigh, Durham area, and youth text the messages. They just went to their local mobile phone carrier, which I don't know which one they chose, and they bought a cell phone, and they got a cell phone contract with unlimited texting. The staff of the organization just take turns carrying this phone in their pocket, and when a text message comes in, they answer it. So it was a very inexpensive way to deliver very personal, real-time information to youth. And frankly, we'd look into a very similar system if we didn't want to cover a whole, except that we want to cover a whole range of public health issues, and we have a much larger youth population. But they had a very elegant solution, a very low budget. And I think for what we're talking about, which is a poll system that requires a service provider like Mobile Commons, although to be clear, we have a contract with Mobile Commons. They're here because they've been very, very generous in helping us understand the options. But again, we'll have the contract with somebody like Mobile Commons. We have to figure out how to get our data into the system, either by hosting it on our computers or by dumping it into our vendors' computers. So that's going to cost about $17,000 to $20,000. But there's definitely cheaper ways to do it. And the Birds and Bees Hotline is a great example. And Michael, did you have anything to add to that? No, I would add, yeah, it all depends on what you want to build. You know, collecting email addresses from, you know, if you have an opportunity to do PSAs or something on the radio, and you want to collect people opting in and giving their email address. That can probably be done for cheaper than the prices Adam is talking about. You know, it all depends, and there's a lot that goes into that. And then the other thing is it makes sense to start collecting mobile numbers now, like no matter what your organization is doing. When people sign up, have them sign up if they want to receive text messages. Give us your number. And that, you know, the list will get weaker. If you text message someone six months after they sign up, they're going to be like, who is this? Why are they texting me? But at least you can prove out for your bosses and your funders, look, people want to receive text messages. So making that an option to at least start collecting those numbers makes sense like tomorrow, no matter what your plans are. That's a really good point. David Hackett said, what about Tatango? It's a free ad-supported SMS to a group. Have you guys used that service? No, I've never heard of them. I mean, I'm sure there's probably like 30 or 40 of them out there. I don't know much about them. You know, if you're willing to be able to send messages with ads, you know, there's going to be people that are able to do it. And I know ForInfo is probably one of the biggest in that space. I've never talked with them or met them, but I've heard about them. And so you just, probably if you want that, you want to go with a reliable source. So, yeah, I would check it out and just do some diligence on them. Well, it's about time to wrap it up. It's already been an hour. These always go by so quickly, but here's the list of resources. We will be sending out a follow-up email with the URLs to each of these organizations and as well as a cluster of links that we talked about during the presentation that have come up. If you have additional questions, I think we answered most every question that came through. But if you do have more questions, please post them in the community forums. There's a tiny URL here, and Becky will be sending that via the chat. If you do have additional questions, please post them there. For those of you who are new to TechSoup, we do have much, much more than just webinars. We have donated software like Microsoft, Adobe, and Symantec. We have a community forum. So if you have questions of any sort, please post them to our community forums and we have volunteers all over the world answering those questions. We also have pertinent articles that are posted on a monthly basis. There are actually more than one a month. And we'd like to thank ReadyTalk. They are sponsoring this webinar series and allowing us to offer these webinars for free. So if you're interested in learning more about ReadyTalk, they have a special training just for TechSoup participants. And lastly, I'd like to thank everyone for participating today, especially the presenters and Becky and Laura. And if you could take a minute to complete the post-event survey to when we're completed. And if you have any questions or want to be in touch, my contact information is at the bottom. Again, this is TechSoupTalk and I'm Kami Griffiths and I'm really appreciating everyone attending the webinar today. And thanks, Michael and Adam. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye. Thank you.